Restorying Narratives of New Teachers' Identity Learning in Writing Studies

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Electronic Theses and Dissertations

5-2017

Stories at work : restorying narratives of new teachers' identity learning in writing studies.

Rachel Gramer University of Louisville

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Recommended Citation Gramer, Rachel, "Stories at work : restorying narratives of new teachers' identity learning in writing studies." (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 2678. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/2678

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STORIES AT WORK: RESTORYING NARRATIVES OF NEW TEACHERS’ IDENTITY LEARNING IN WRITING STUDIES

Rachel Gramer B.A., Rollins College, 2001 M.A., University of Central Florida, 2008

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy in English/Rhetoric and Composition

Department of English University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky

May 2017

Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0 U.S.) 2107

By Rachel Gramer

Some Rights Reserved

STORIES AT WORK: RESTORYING NARRATIVES OF NEW TEACHERS’ IDENTITY LEARNING IN WRITING STUDIES

Rachel Gramer B.A., Rollins College, 2001 M.A., University of Central Florida, 2008

A Dissertation Approved on

April 17, 2017

By the following Dissertation Committee:

Mary P. Sheridan

Bronwyn T. Williams

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe

Jessica Restaino

DEDICATION

These pages and this project are dedicated

to the supportive women, feminist mentors, and loved ones who have encouraged me to tell, to change, and to live out so many stories—

and whose stories and storytelling remind me every day

why we are here and how we should live.

“I could tell you stories—

if only stories could tell what I had in me to tell.”

—Patricia Hampl, “Red Sky in the Morning”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am forever grateful for the relentless encouragement of Mary P. Sheridan. You continue to teach me how to be a feminist by daily living like one. Without your good questions, my work would not be as complex or meaningful; without your devotion to me figuring out how to put myself on the disciplinary map, this project would not have been mine and I wouldn’t have learned as much about being a researcher; without your time, especially in this final year, this document would not have come to fruition; and without your fierce support, my doctoral education would not be marked in my memory by nearly as much pride, joy, or confidence. Your friendship is a gift through which you bring and inspire presence and gratitude, glorious irreverence and effervescent laughter.

I am also deeply grateful for the care and thoughtfulness of Jess Restaino. Your enthusiasm has sustained me when my own was depleted. This project would not be possible without your work, First Semester, and I would not have seen nearly as much of the potential of my own work without you and yours. Connecting with you and discovering your feminist forthrightness and human hilarity have been the most buttressing surprises of this dissertation.

I am so thankful for the support of my full committee at various points in my doctoral education and always when I needed them most. Thank you, Brenda

Brueggemann, for infusing whimsy and laughter into moments otherwise weighty with frustration and doubt, for your prescient seeing and listening to what is present as well as

absent, and for your extensive time spent reading this document and thinking deeply about who we are and who we’d like to be as teachers, researchers, and administrators.

Thank you, Bronwyn Williams, for kindly, repeatedly reminding me that education is a tremendous act of hubris and humility worth trying for as long as we have the energy and stamina (and we do)—not for ourselves, but for our students, for writers, for those who deserve our support. Thank you, Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe, for your support for my work and this project whichever direction it turned and for much-appreciated cheerleading from the sidelines whether beyond my field or across state lines.

In countless moments in between and around this project, I have also been privileged to experience the patience, comfort, and encouragement of an amazing crew of family and friends-who-are-family. My parents, Debbie and Tom Gramer, continue to teach me how to love, listen, and support others by modeling those behaviors with me.

Thank you for listening to far more work talk than anyone should have to endure and for articulating your faith in me at every turn. Keri Mathis and Laura Matravers sat with me through every dark moment, especially during the last two years, by text and by call, by gif and by emoji. Thank you, Keri, for welcoming me into your family, being the Pot to my Kettle, and shining so brightly in ways that illuminate us all. Thank you, Laura, for sharing your time, couch, cat, and weirdnesses and for mentoring me in return to deepen my own eccentricities and truths. I am also deeply grateful for other lovely people who have made the past four years in Louisville such a gift: my fantastic writing group and cohort, Liz, Megan, Laura, Jamila, Travis, and Michelle; and my wondrous peers and friends, Hollye, Caroline, Mike, Layne, Tasha, and Justin. And finally, I am deeply indebted to so many Florida “peeps,” past and present, who have contributed more to my

own story than we will ever know; my Florida friends have taken me in and wrapped me up repeatedly when I needed care most, including Kathleen Bell who has continued to mentor me with her sharp candor, keen smarts, and bottomless belief in my capacity to learn and do good work in the world.

To the five participants who gave me their time, energy, and goodwill, I cannot thank you enough; not only are your stories creating and shaping the story of this project, but also your enthusiasm and learning make my work that much easier and far more compelling than I can possibly make it alone. And to the scholars whose histories and perspectives precede and infuse my work—including Debra Journet, Gesa Kirsch, and so many others—thank you. Your stances toward stories and toward research have enabled me to build my own.

I am also—always—deeply indebted to my grandmother, Opal Miller, who so proudly introduced me as “this is my granddaughter, Rachel,” right up until the end; accompanying her through the process of dying is still the accomplishment of which I am most proud and which, in many ways, nudged me onto the trajectory of fierceness and trust that this dissertation represents.

ABSTRACT

STORIES AT WORK: RESTORYING NARRATIVES OF NEW TEACHERS’

IDENTITY LEARNING IN WRITING STUDIES

Rachel Gramer

April 17, 2017

Rhetoric and composition has a long, robust history of studying how we train new writing teachers in our graduate/writing programs; yet we lack in-depth inquiries that foreground how new writing teachers learn. This dissertation traces five graduate students learning how to be and become writing teachers, using narrative as an object and means of analysis to study the tacitly internalized process of newcomer professional identity learning. In this project, I enact narrative as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology to restory new writing teacher research narratives away from implicit deficit or explicit resistance and toward a more generative focus on newcomers’ motivated learning and complex experiences mediated by understandings of teaching, learning, and education that precede, exceed, and infuse the program training and academic literacy histories that our research has historically privileged.

Drawing on research in writing studies, education, sociology, and psychology, this dissertation conducts a narrative inquiry into new writing teachers’ identity learning by analyzing stories of teaching and learning elicited from five new writing teachers during a year-long semi-structured, text-based interview study. Using the interplay of

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thematic and structural analysis of participants’ 248 stories and artifact analysis of participants’ teaching texts, I practice narrative inquiry as an explicitly feminist methodology to destabilize and interrogate what we think we know about new writing teachers’ identities and understandings of learning (as in Chapter Three), experiences and teaching troubles (as in Chapter Four), and motivated desires for the future (as in Chapter

Five). I also rely on interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity to understand new teachers as complex people mediated and motivated over time in ways that academic writing/composition theories alone have not adequately illuminated. Ultimately, I argue that new teacher research in writing studies should employ more complex methodologies for studying new writing teachers’ identities as learned and storied over time; and that listening rhetorically to newcomers’ stories and for learning and meaning-making is one way to interrupt unproductive assumptions about newcomer deficit or resistance and to restory our research, administrative, and teaching practices to authorize and encourage more agentive positions from which newcomers (and we all) can learn to act.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Dedication ...... iii

Acknowledgements ...... iv

Abstract...... vii

List of Tables ...... x

List of Figures ...... xi

Chapter One New Teacher Stories We’ve Learned to Tell ...... 1

Chapter Two Narrative Inquiry as Method and Methodology for Tracing New Writing

Teachers’ Identity Learning ...... 38

Chapter Three Not Very Dead Poets Society: New Writing Teachers’ Own Narratives of

Schooling, Learning, and Teaching...... 80

Chapter Four Telling Troubles: Agency and Affect in New Writing Teachers’ “Stories to

Share” ...... 148

Chapter Five Motivated Identities in Motion: New Writing Teachers’ Storied Talk of

Teaching Texts for Students ...... 202

Chapter Six In the Midst: Conclusions, Questions, Challenges of Restorying What We’ve

Learned ...... 256

References...... 288

Appendices ...... 310

Curriculum Vitae ...... 335

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Research Questions for Coding Chapter Three ...... 103

Table 2 Teacher Roles from Scholarship ...... 107

Table 3 20 Most Frequent Teaching Roles in My Corpus ...... 108

Table 4 20 Least Frequent Teaching Roles in My Corpus ...... 108

Table 5 Stories to Share Interview Questions ...... 150

Table 6 Research Questions for Coding Chapter Four ...... 166

Table 7 Initial Codes for Tracing Actual and Designated Identity Definitions ...... 213

Table 8 Initial and Additional Codes for Tracing Actual and Designated Identities ...... 217

Table 9 Common Linguistic Constructions/Identity Markers from My Corpus ...... 220

Table 10 Teacher Text Interview Questions ...... 222

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1 All stories analyzed for Chapter Four (N = 36) ...... 169

Figure 2 Total number of resources coded in/underneath "stories to share" ...... 169

Figure 3 Resources present in "stories to share" by story type and select resource type ...... 170

Figure 4 Most frequent turning points by story type ...... 170

Figure 5 Turning points by narrative trajectory type ...... 171

Figure 6 Narrative trajectories by story type ...... 171

Figure 7 Home page for Violet's first-year writing course ...... 228

Figure 8 Schedule overview page from Violet's course website ...... 231

Figure 9 Violet's resources for first-year writing students ...... 233

Figure 10 Violet's annotated bibliography assignment from the beginning of the term .233

Figure 11 Violet's final project assignment, developed with students ...... 234

Figure 12 James' notes on the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing's eight habits of mind ...... 243

Figure 13 James' re-enactment of drawing discourse for his first-year writing students ...... 246

Figure 14 James' notes on James Gee, discourse, and literacy ...... 247

Figure 15 from James notes, what he indicates as the kind of teacher he does not want to be ...... 248

CHAPTER ONE

NEW TEACHER STORIES WE’VE LEARNED TO TELL

“What kinds of stories have we learned to tell? How are stories shaped by disciplinary preferences as well as theoretical and cultural commitments?” —Debra Journet,

“Narrative Turns in Writing Studies Research,” p. 21

“In the end, the best stories we tell are the ones that connect us to each other.” —Jessica

Restaino, First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of

Middle Ground, p. 17

I want to tell a story about new writing teachers. Not one that is limited to what static documents can tell us about their teaching, or that understands teachers primarily in relation to writing program outcomes, graduate program training, or institutional accountability for undergraduate education.

I want to tell a story about teacher development in writing studies. Not just how we learn to teach but also how we learn to be and continue becoming writing teachers over time, in ways that precede, exceed, and infuse authorized sites of new teacher preparation.

I want to tell a story about newcomer identity learning. One that complicates and destabilizes still-sedimented possession or construction metaphors to ask how writing program research might look different if we enact an understanding of identities not as something we “have” or “build” with writing programs as the primary mediational force, but as something we learn unconsciously and perform unevenly in and over time across domains of activity.

I want to tell a story about storytelling and everyday storytellers. Especially for newcomers who don't think they have stories worth telling. Because I believe that stories can change people faster than people can change institutions—but in either case, change begins with individuals.

I want to tell a story about how narrative as a feminist interdisciplinary methodology can help us, as a field, to restory our assumptions of new writing teachers who are graduate students in English. Not by concluding with a set of prescriptive practices for new teachers or those who support them, but by offering instead a narrative model of questioning our own human, programmatic, and institutional leanings toward certainty, coherence, and monocausality.

I borrow Elizabeth Alexander's opening strategy from her memoir, The Light of the World—a relatively brief, straightforward version of Malea Powell’s multiple and multimodal stories in her “2012 CCCC Chair’s Address”—and share these multiple beginnings not just to suggest it is difficult to know where to start; but to draw attention to the underlying truth that our stories of who we are right now have multiple beginnings—none of which are false starts, because they all contribute to our slippery sense of self and to the process of our own complex identity learning. As teachers and as

scholars, we are simply more complex than any one discipline can account for in ways that a strict commitment to composition disciplinarity threatens to encapsulate and flatten rather than to expound and expand.

Stories about new writing teachers emerge from and are inextricably intertwined with other stories we have learned to tell in our discipline, our institutions, and in/through our research. Journet’s latter question about “disciplinary preferences as well as theoretical and cultural commitments” easily morphs into three queries relevant to new teacher education in writing studies: How are our stories about new writing teachers shaped by (1) our own disciplinary preferences toward writing pedagogy stances at any given moment? (2) individual writing program—and program administrators’— commitments to a certain set of theories rather than another? and (3) the cultural commitments of our educational institutions, situated in specific places, spaces, and times? If narrative is a powerful mediational force in everyday life, if narrative is both epistemological and phenomenological—and I believe that it is—then the stories we have learned to tell have power to shape what we know, how we experience the world, and what future actions we take (or don’t). As an administrator and mentor, I am invested in supporting graduate students and all writing teachers as we shape and restory our lives and teaching identities. Yet as a narrative researcher in writing studies, I am even more deeply dedicated to asking questions and doing work that hopes to restory several

(though certainly not all) narratives that permeate and undergird some assumptions about new college writing teachers as a social group; and as a feminist researcher, I am committed to interrogating how such assumptions are embedded, represented, and reproduced in scholarship authored (and taken up) by faculty in positions of power over

newcomers. Specifically, this dissertation seeks to restory new teacher narratives away from explicit resistance and implicit deficit and toward a more generative focus on newcomers’ motivated learning and complexly mediated experiences.

At the outset, I want to be clear that, as a field, we have learned to tell many stories about new teacher identities, practices, and experiences; and I believe that these stories are largely motivated by scholars who genuinely want to support newcomers in the challenging multi-layered struggles of being a new college writing teacher. Each layer—institutional, programmatic, disciplinary, individual—brings its own complexities, which no researcher can capture in any single study, and its own troubles, which most administrators and faculty hope they might be able to ease or abate. Further, I also understand that, in everyday practice in writing/graduate programs across the U.S., there are far more stories at work than appear in scholarly publication, research that carries its own institutional and generic limitations (e.g., time, ethics, transparency, representation of others of/in print). In our body of new writing teacher scholarship, researchers (who are also often administrators) demonstrate keen awareness that newcomers’ embodied challenges are exacerbated by institutional demands on everyone’s time, the limitations of current structures for new writing teacher education, and any myriad number of personal and professional struggles along the way. And yet. The inherited structures remain (e.g., the practicum), and—even more salient for this project—the tone and tenor of several of these stories (which I detail in this chapter) too often remain embedded in troubles rather than triumph when they begin by framing new teachers’ impoverished experiences with teaching and/or writing rather than foregrounding the situated complexities of motivated learning. In brief, even though as a field we have restoried many of our narratives of

deficit about undergraduate student writers, there are too many new teacher research stories in writing studies that implicitly rely on conceptions of new teachers as holes that need to be emptied (of their knowledge and experiences) and filled (with our understandings of composition), rather than as whole people who need to be understood beyond any unproductive deficit model. If, as Jessica Restaino remarks, “the best stories we tell are the ones that connect us to each other” (17), then we still need to learn to tell better stories about new writing teachers that connect us all as complex knowers, learners, and people. One way to do so is to begin with a feminist study design that destabilizes the stories of those in power, acknowledges the complicity of those who have created those stories, and seeks instead to elicit and value the stories and experiences of those we are charged with supporting. As D. Jean Clandinin and F. Michael Connelly suggest of narrative inquirers:

We have helped make the world in which we find ourselves. We are not

merely objective inquirers, people on the high road, who study a world

lesser in quality than our moral temperament would have it, people who

study a world we did not help create. On the contrary, we are complicit in

the world we study. Being in this world, we need to remake ourselves as

well as offer up research understandings that could lead to a better world.

(Narrative Inquiry 61)

In this dissertation, I “offer up” such research understandings that have resulted from my narrative inquiry into new writing teacher identity learning—through which I have sought to underscore newcomer identities, learning, and experiences as enabling as well as constraining, generative as well as limiting; through which I hope we may interrogate

conclusions that have been refracted by the stories we have inherited; and which I hope will inform how we continue to use our administrative and institutional power to support the newcomers whom we have been given “power over” in feeling more than

“powerless.”

In some ways, the “CCCC Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing” has codified some of our commonplace disciplinary stories surrounding teacher preparation. The recently revised statement—informed by a 2015 survey—opens with a paragraph focusing on college students and the relationships between some of our valued theories and practices (writing, rhetoric, literacy), institutional and educational outcomes

(citizenship, success, habits of mind), and our means of achieving them (writing courses, writing instruction). The statement then asserts that “an investment in the training and professional development of writing instructors is an investment in student learning and success… including student retention, persistence, and degree completion” (“CCCC

Statement on Preparing Teachers”). Further, the statement proceeds to define who writing teachers are and should be: “Exemplary writing instructors are highly competent, reflective practitioners who prioritize students’ learning needs and experiences, integrate contemporary composition theory and research into their teaching practices, and contribute their disciplinary expertise to improve their departments and institutions”

(“CCCC Statement on Preparing Teachers”). The statement also categorizes the

“required” “broad base of theoretical knowledge” (rhetorical knowledge, linguistic knowledge, instructional knowledge, ethical and effective research methods, and technical knowledge) before offering “principles, requirements, and recommendations that should inform the preparation and ongoing professional development of instructors”

in three discrete categories: “Dual Credit/Concurrent Enrollment programs, graduate teaching assistants,1 and new and continuing faculty” (“CCCC Statement on Preparing

Teachers”).

Compared to its 1982 counterpart, this CCCC statement is much improved: it acknowledges multiple audiences for the statement (students, parents, instructors, administrator, legislators); focuses on student learning first, followed by composition theory and reciprocal participation in both departments and institutions; and makes a more detailed attempt at thoroughness with explicit attention to the resources and responsibilities required to prepare those in the named institutional positions. Of course, problematic assumptions still underlie the statement’s construction. For instance, the statement emphasizes traditional masculinist structures2 for teacher training: namely, graduate-level coursework and authorized professional development. A similarly unfortunate pattern emerges in the distinctions between what is “required” (training) and what is “recommended” (mentoring), again creating situations in which top-down institutionally authorized hierarchies and structures for transmission are more likely to

1 Throughout my project, I try not to invoke the title “Graduate Teaching Assistant” or its acronym “GTA” often because this concept is a non-starter in writing studies. As a term, it has institutional history and is perhaps more accurate in other fields where graduate students act as assistants for faculty, rather than the writing teachers in our field who are “teachers” of record, not “assistants.” They are teaching and responsible for their own courses, often from syllabus to final assessment. (See Brown for a similar critique—which is not as common a critique as I would have imagined or hoped.) Further, I also prefer the term “new teachers,” which I often use interchangeably with “newcomers” here, rather than “graduate students” or “graduate student- teachers” not only because my focus is on teaching as a vital part of professional identity, but also because “newcomer” explicitly points to the experiences of learning something new while “graduate student” is a less useful term that implies a “higher” status than undergraduate but is still too often conflated institutionally and disciplinarily with inexperience and novicehood in practice—and not in particularly generous ways. 2 I use “traditional” in relation to education: that is, traditional educational structures based on transmission models of education. And I use “masculinist” here in relation to hierarchy: that is, masculinist workplace (or other institutional) structures based on top-down models of authority. 7

dominate interactions. And finally, while the organization of the latter part of the statement relies on titles that institutions might need in order to operationalize training— in this case, by hierarchy/institutional position (dual credit programs, graduate students, and faculty)—such titles in practice can also lump individuals into social groups that flatten and conflate teacher identities and draw inaccurate correlations between current institutional position and teacher development (which are not tandem trajectories).

As a boundary document guiding writing teacher preparation, the revised CCCC statement does represent several stories we have learned to tell about teacher preparation in writing studies—which are related to the privileged locus of study in our body of new teacher research. Historically, as a field, our new teacher preparation structures have emphasized time-bound training (i.e., a semester or year-long practicum) and privileged the role of specific composition theories and paradigms (e.g., Farris traces Murrayesque pedagogy in Subject to Change).3 And new teacher research has often followed suit: studying training,4 foregrounding specific composition paradigms (e.g., process, expressivist, discourse communities, social theories of language),5 and focusing on singular identities (i.e., the role of the Teacher or, at most, Teacher-Student) with sub- field disciplinarity (i.e., literature, creative writing, rhetoric and composition), institutional position (i.e., graduate student, new faculty, senior faculty), and program training (i.e., the practicum, professional development, and administrative mentoring) emphasized as mediational forces.

3 See also Pytlik and Liggett’s preface to Preparing College Teachers of Writing; and Wilhoit’s “Recent Trends in TA Instruction: A Bibliographic Essay” from 2002. 4 See Dobrin’s introduction (7-19) or Restaino’s first chapter (18-21) for concise histories and excellent mapping of new teacher training from the 1950s onward. 5 See Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach; Farris, Subject to Change; and Powell et al., respectively. 8

Perhaps it comes as no surprise then that new writing teacher research is comprised of stories we have learned to tell that have, over time, come to rest in several interrelated narrative grooves; these grooves, both individually and collectively

(described in brief here and further in depth in the next section), are not necessarily ones that will help us work toward a productive future for writing teacher education and new teacher research in writing studies. One groove emerges from robust disciplinary histories of studying training, often bound by a semester or year within authorized structures of support. In addition to stories that suggest training matters first or most (Thomas, 1916;6

Hunting, 1951; “Training Graduate Students as Teachers,” 1963; Dobrin, 2005), there is also a continuing groove of new teacher resistance (Welch, 1993; Hesse, 1993; Barr

Ebest, 2005; Grouling, 2015), which often assumes resistance as inevitable and, in doing so, implicitly presumes that we know how to recognize new teacher resistance and its source(s). Another groove, often related to resistance, is writing—a term that usually, in new teacher research, stands in for print-based, page-based academic writing (just as

“writing teacher” is often unmarked code for “first-year writing instructor,” often at four- year institutions). In stories in which specific views on, or practices in, writing are foregrounded (Farris, 1996; Barr Ebest, 2005; Camp, 2013), there is also a continuing critique that new teachers have limiting constructs of academic writing (Dryer, 2012) and limited/ing experience with effective writing pedagogy (Reid, 2009). Still another narrative groove is visible in our continual interest in new teacher identity. Some stories in this groove cluster around certain new roles for graduate student teachers (i.e., College

Teacher, Graduate Student, Graduate-level Writer) (Hesse, 1993; Restaino, 2012;

6 I include years for certain citations in this chapter to show the temporal scope of these four select resonant threads in new writing teacher research. 9

Grouling, 2015) and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, also position new teachers’ professional histories as impoverished and social identities as hindering their effectiveness as writing instructors (Rankin, 1994; Farris, 1996; Ritchie and Wilson, 2000; Powell et al., 2002).

Individually, situated in the contexts of the research that preceded them, these stories might not be inaccurate. Yet they are not inarguable or impenetrable either, and collectively they are certainly not the only stories we can learn to tell about what matters in college writing teacher education and new teacher identities in writing studies. More importantly, because such stories can fall into overdetermined narratives of what new teachers don’t know, can/will not do, and do not seem to learn within the time- boundedness of training, these stories do not represent particularly generative stances toward new teachers or open up ways to study newcomers differently to see how we might reveal not just other stories but other kinds of stories about what new writing teachers know and can do and how they learn. It is my contention not that scholars’ writing up of new teacher research is purposefully lacking in faculty generosity toward newcomers—but that too many study designs are inflected with academic assumptions of deficiency at the outset. However “true” such research stories might be, studies that foreground deficiency often position more experienced scholars as intervening figures of transformation (however successful their intervention, or not) while downplaying our own complicity in the injustices of institutional labor or of unreasonable expectations for how much change can happen in the course of a semester, without illuminating more agentive forward motion of writing teacher education and learning. The latter is the focus of this study: that is, the complexities of newcomer learning, rather than any kind of

“novice” not-knowing.

In this project, I enact narrative as one way to infinitely complicate the new teacher stories we have learned to tell and open up paths to other stories not already privileged by those who have more institutional and disciplinary knowledge and power than the newcomers with whom they work. In brief, my year-long semi-structured and document-based interview study elicited stories of teaching and learning from five graduate students learning professional teaching identities for the first time within the same writing program (described in depth in Chapter Two). As narrative inquiry scholars in education Clandinin and Connelly have written, “In narrative thinking, interpretations of events can always be otherwise” (Narrative Inquiry 31). My starting point in this project has been to privilege the nearly 250 stories in my corpus in order to glean what we can learn as a field from newcomers’ stories and to explore how we might elicit stories of what can be—and, in fact, is already—otherwise, or other than what we have already learned to tell about new writing teachers. Enacted as a feminist interdisciplinary methodology (also explicated in Chapter Two), narrative is one means not of studying training or focusing on writing, but of studying learning and focusing on the relationships between identity and learning—both of which are deeply and tacitly internalized, unevenly performed, highly motivated, storied in and over time in ways that precede and exceed any single role, activity, domain, or discipline. Because learning and identities are so tacitly internalized over time, I have elected to study individuals at the beginning of their teaching careers—the “earliest” point suggested even in the CCCC statement categories of “Dual Credit/Concurrent Enrollment programs, graduate teaching assistants, and new and continuing faculty”—to illuminate early moments of identity learning not already mediated by extensive years of teaching experience and temporal distance from

their early learning experiences. As Restaino writes in First Semester, “In graduate students—their aspirations, their perceptions, their very newness—we see the tensions and complexities of our field cracked open in a particularly vulnerable way” (108). This study illuminates the stories of participants who might help us understand in more nuanced terms the learning of newcomers in moments of newness, vulnerability, and change.

As a mediational force that often functions invisibly across all areas of our lives, narrative offers one means of studying teachers capaciously, as human beings developing ever-changing complex relationships not just with knowledge and writing, but also with other human beings situated within institutional histories over time and beyond the narrow domains of what sometimes counts as worth telling in writing program research.

The function of my project, then, has been to elicit, study, and listen deeply and rhetorically to newcomers’ complex identity learning and stories without relegating them

(the individuals or their stories)—or myself as a researcher—to the commonplace narrative grooves already prevalent in our field: of training, of resistance, of newcomer deficit, and of program training or composition paradigms as the primary mediational, motivational forces for being and becoming a writing teacher. Specifically, my ongoing project enacts narrative as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology to restory us away from already commonplace grooves with the following overarching goals—the first two of which are carried out in this dissertation:

1. The first goal is to destabilize well-worn narrative grooves of deficit about new

teachers—as we have very much learned to do in rewriting and restorying

narratives of undergraduate student writers over the last few decades.

2. The second goal is to theorize new teacher identity learning by relying on

intersecting interdisciplinary theories of identities and learning in order to

foreground the complex roles of participant histories, motivation, affect, and

agency in directing action, rather than focusing on the role of writing program

practices, composition paradigms, or academic literacies/histories as mediating

and motivating new teacher action.

3. The third goal is to trace teacher development in moments when new teachers’

professional identities are both beginning and shifting and continue to trace their

development over time, outside the bounds of a single semester or year—a

longitudinal commitment to individuals as they develop from semester to

semester, course to course, and across institutions over time (rather than the more

typical disciplinary commitment to longitudinal program research—needed work

with clearly different ends in mind).

4. The fourth goal is to incorporate and make visible participants’ responses to my

analysis, a qualitative research and feminist methodological practice often

practiced but rendered invisible in academic publication. 7

In this introduction chapter, I begin with a condensed overview of some of the

(above) commonplace stories we have told about new writing teachers in disciplinary scholarship, turning a critical eye on the body of research often about teachers without necessarily being by, for, or with them.8 What stories have we learned to tell about who

7 I am currently working toward these latter two goals as I share dissertation chapters with participants (methods further detailed in Chapter Two), elicit their responses, and continue storied and document-based interviews about their teaching and learning. 8 I borrow the structure—and stance—of distinctions between research “for,” “with,” and “about” from Thomas’ Deans’ “English Studies and Public Service.” Rather than new teachers, Deans’ focus is on community partners. 13

new writing teachers are—and why? Where do these stories come from? And what consequences might they bear out in our interactions with newcomers? Then, in the closing sections, I briefly introduce each of my dissertation chapters and preview the storied questions that still remain surrounding new teacher research and individual teacher long-term identity learning and development.

In this dissertation, I argue that, as a field, we need to listen to new teachers’ stories at work—eliciting experiences narratively, not just analyzing them narratively—in order to learn what we don’t know (and also what we cannot know with certainty) about newcomer identity learning. And I enact narrative as one methodology (or bricolage set of methodologies) that we can actively put to work to make the familiar just strange enough to help those who are more experienced teacher-scholars see identity learning as an unknown, often unarticulated component invisibly at work during any newcomer enculturation moment or activity. Engaging in narrative as a feminist interdisciplinary methodology can help us as a field work toward two vital goals: (1) illuminating new paths for how we might better support newcomers as they develop over time and learn professional identities not just as teachers but also as scholars and working professionals; and (2) restorying disciplinary narratives of explicit resistance and implicit deficit in new teacher research and preparation in writing studies.

Resonant Threads in New Writing Teacher Research

While there is no singular story of new teacher research in writing studies, the seemingly singular story I tell here is inflected by several narrative threads that resonate with me as a feminist teacher, mentor, and administrator. In Engaging in Narrative

Inquiry, Clandinin suggests that resonant threads are “particular plotlines that threaded or wove over time and place through an individual’s narrative account” (132).9 In this section, I do more than name the four threads identified above in published new teacher research (i.e., training, resistance, writing, and identities) that have resonated with me; I suggest possible origins for them as a group and then describe them as well as why they emerge from (and reproduce) a collective set of stories with particularly troublesome assumptions and consequences for newcomers. Finally, I argue that we might restory new teacher research via narrative as one feminist, interdisciplinary intervention.

Where do our stories come from?

More often than not, studies of new writing teachers in English are also studies of graduate and writing programs and the institutional conditions that support these programs, teachers, and administrators (or not). The bulk of these studies rely on WPA experiences and perspectives (e.g., Brown; Laterell; Guerra and Bawarshi; Comer;

Belanger and Gruber) and typically focus on individual programs and practices (e.g.,

Davies; Farris, Subject to Change and “Too Cool for School?”; Anson, Jolliffe, and

Shapiro), practicum courses (e.g., Dobrin; Powell et al.; Skorczewski, “From Playing the

Role”), and problems with/in practica or programs (e.g., Huntley; Rickly and Harrington;

Trubek). Methodologically, such studies often focus on institutional documents in the

9 To set the scene for my project, the “case” is not just an individual, but the collective stories of new writing teacher research. Similarly, as explicated in the next chapter, while my project relies on case study research and methods, the “case” in point is not necessarily an individual participant but the group of participants who are all starting “in the same place” and program, and each participant represents one possible set of professional identity plotlines that might potentially “begin” within any of our writing programs (see Dyson and Genishi’s On the Case for more on the bounds of any case). 15

form of practica syllabi (Bolin, Burmester, Faber, and Vandenberg), graduate student writing assignments (Juzwik et al.), teacher portfolios (Kitchens), or writing program archives (Davies). Occasionally, scholars conduct research via writing program and administrator surveys (Burmester; Latterell). More frequently, WPA narratives of new teacher preparation focus on administrative and teaching practices in authorized sites of programmatic learning (practicum, orientation, other professional development) often relying on administrator perception and articulation of practice, participating in our history of experienced teacher-scholar lore (Harrington and Adler-Kassner; Haswell and

Lu).

These predominantly institutional and programmatic narratives are valuable and necessary (see Davies’ “Taking the Long View”), have emerged from and contributed to

WPA research as intellectual work (see Payne and Enos), and have enabled us to tell stories about how we (think we) teach new teachers in our field. Yet, for the most part, this body of research has illuminated what Kathleen Blake Yancey calls the delivered curriculum, or “the one we design” (Teaching Literature 17), drawing conclusions about what (and how) faculty and administrators teach graduate students who are new writing teachers. In her expanded definition (see Teaching Literature Chapter 3), Yancey characterizes as well as critiques the delivered curriculum:

In some ways, we might assume that the delivered curriculum is the

“easy” curriculum, given that this is the curriculum that is visible—in

syllabi, in reading and writing tasks, in course outcomes and goals. The

delivered curriculum, all too often, is the curriculum. At the same time, the

delivered curriculum (over)relies on students playing a singular role: as it

conventionally played, the school game, which spins off from the

delivered curriculum, asks students to tell us what they know, not what

they don’t know. It rewards students for strongly asserting their claims to

knowledge… (41)

Recently, though, there has been a renewed interest from scholars illuminating what

Yancey identifies as the experienced curriculum, “the curriculum that students construct in the context of both the lived curriculum they bring in with them and the delivered curriculum we seek to share” (58, emphasis in original) (see Teaching Literature Chapter

4). One key contribution of this shift toward the curriculum as experienced by individual new teachers is the inclusion (long called for) of graduate student voices (Burmester

127). Sally Barr Ebest, Dylan B. Dryer, and Jessica Restaino, among others (Camp,

Kitchens, Rodrigue), have recently participated in more granular interview studies of new writing teachers rather than brief surveys or observational lore, following a path first explored by Christine Farris and Elizabeth Rankin in the early 1990s. However, even as scholars have attempted to study the experienced curriculum, our inherited narratives surrounding the delivered curriculum have also constrained us in telling only certain kinds of stories about the experienced curriculum and the entanglements of the delivered and experienced curriculum with that of the lived curriculum, which Yancey defines as the “formal and informal experience that students bring with them into our classrooms”

(Teaching Literature 22; see Chapter 2). At its outset, this project did not aim to look primarily at the lived curriculum (though this is largely my focus in Chapter Three); but over time, it has evolved to illuminate how the lived curriculum shifts as new teachers are teaching—not ending temporally at the moment when students “enter” a practicum or

program or first semester or year of teaching, assuming instead that what teachers “bring in with them” changes radically during their graduate education and early teaching years—which reveals a different kind of story than some of the stories we have learned to tell, via the delivered and experienced curriculum, about who graduate student teachers are and how we might best support them in developing as teachers and professionals over time.

What are some of the stories we have learned to tell?

As a field, we have a robust disciplinary history of studying training, often bound by a semester or year within authorized structures of support. In still oft-cited work tracing back 100 years, “training” is often conflated with the practicum course, invoked as a term and written up by English department faculty not “trained” in composition:

“Training for Teaching Composition in Colleges” (Thomas, 1916)

“A Training Course for Teachers of Freshman Composition” (Hunting,

1951)

“Training Graduate Students as Teachers” (1963)

“Training New Teachers of Composition in the Writing of Comments on

Themes” (Larson 1966)

“The Training of Junior College English Teachers” (Prichard 1970)

More recently, rhetoric and composition scholars have added to—and hopefully supplanted some—outdated perspectives on new writing teacher training. Since the

1990s, thanks to the growing body of WPA research, scholars have shared and theorized from their embodied experience as individuals engaged in the everyday practice of new

teacher preparation in institutions across the U.S. However, the resonant thread of training remains:

Training the New Teacher of College Composition (Bridges, 1986)

“Resisting the Faith: Conversion, Resistance, and the Training of

Teachers” (Welch, 1993)

“Training the Workforce: An Overview of GTA Education Curricula”

(Latterell, 1996)

“GAT Training in Collaborative Teaching at the University of

Arizona” (Brobbel, et al, 2002)

Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of

Teaching Assistants (Ebest, 2005)

“Writing/Teachers and Digital Technologies: Technology/Teacher

Training” (Atkins, 2006)

Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession: Training the Next Wave in

Rhetoric and Composition (Anderson and Romano, 2006)

Itself a long-contested hotbed issue in our field (as evidenced by the title and collected essays in Dobrin’s Don’t Call It That: The Composition Practicum), the practicum is still central in conversations about training (Addison; Guerra and Bawarshi; kyburz; Powell, et al.; Trubek; Welch), but scholars have also expanded their scope to include other authorized sites of institutional, programmatic, and disciplinary enculturation, such as mentoring (Rickly and Harrington; Christoph et al.; Goodburn and

Leverenz; Blackmon and Rose; Barr Ebest, “Mentoring”) and professional development broadly conceived (Yancey, “Professionalization”; Hea and Turnley). In such

contemporary work, the faculty and, in some cases, graduate student WPAs performing this research are writing studies researchers, not literary scholars; yet the disciplinary constitution of the new teachers they study has not changed as much (i.e., most programs under study are still dominated by literature graduate students), nor has the methodological privileging of examining program practices and documents. In other words, much of this contemporary research still predominantly illuminates the curriculum delivered by those in charge of training who have the benefit of institutional position and power as well as a depth and breadth of disciplinary knowledge, experience, and investment (cf Burmester; Yancey, “Professionalization”; Anderson and Romano).10

Certainly, there are practical reasons for studying training: the practicum is a contested composition site deserving of research activity; WPAs are institutionally responsible for teacher training and assessment of that training; and research of our own writing program practices is needed to improve new teacher preparedness in localized contexts (see Guerra and Bawarshi on this last point). We may also safely assume that many WPAs need to make practical research choices given their work load—the weight of which is not to be underestimated. I see and value the methodological rationale for studying training in order to make research more manageable and conclusions more focused on what we think we can control within the bounds of our own institutional time- spaces. However, focusing our research on training that we think we can guide administratively also reproduces rather than destabilizes several faulty premises that I think we would be wise to interrogate. First, that our curriculum is the primary

10 Burmester especially calls for the meaningful inclusion of graduate student teacher voices in new teacher research, which several scholars have responded to (e.g., Barr Ebest, Changing; Restaino, Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”); but a great deal of research continues to talk about new teachers without presenting substantive evidence from those new teachers. 20

mediational force in teacher learning is a construction we have inherited, albeit an apt educational aim. Even Yancey’s notion of lived, delivered, and experienced curriculum

(in Teaching Literature) largely narrows our focus to “curriculum”—in appropriate institutional educational style—as an assumed ruling script. Further, undergirding our focus on training is a too-often unstated assumption that learning takes place primarily during such training, rather than preceding, infusing, and exceeding our institutional bounds. Last, our use of the term “training” points to our reliance on one terministic screen of many, not necessarily the most useful. In Communities of Practice, Etienne

Wenger maintains a useful distinction between training and education: “Whereas training aims to create an inbound trajectory targeted at competence in a specific practice, education must strive to open new dimensions for the negotiation of the self’” (263).

Long-standing critiques in new teacher research suggest that we need to continue to push against any conceptions of teaching as training in a specific codified set of practices (i.e., the “nuts and bolts” of teaching college writing, as much as attention to logistics eases some everyday concerns)11 and to work hard instead to model and encourage newcomers in the educational practices of being open to multiple, often dissonant meanings and figuring out how to perform teaching writing as a shifting rhetorical activity (see Farris,

“Too Cool for School?”; Goleman). Wenger’s distinction between education and training also points to a complication we do not explicitly attend to: that new teacher preparation is both workplace training and a part of graduate education, each of which comes with its own lingering ideological underpinnings. Workplace training is often a site where neoliberal institutions ration out various levels of autonomy and authorize critical

11 For example, Newkirk’s Nuts & Bolts: A Practical Guide to Teaching College Composition and Roen et al.’s Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition. 21

thinking only to the extent that it benefits a company’s bottom line (see Gee, Hull, and

Lankshear); and there is still, unfortunately for us all, a readily available narrative groove of amotivational transmission model education still too often assumed in graduate education, especially in mandated courses (Goleman; Wilhoit; Latterell). Unfortunately, then, the persistence of training as a resonant thread brings with it embedded assumptions that new teacher researchers may not realize or address, but that are powerfully present in our thinking just the same.

Often, especially within tales of training and delivered curriculum, there is

(perhaps unsurprisingly) a resonant thread of new teacher resistance. In his introduction to Don’t Call It That, Sidney I. Dobrin suggests that scholars invested in new teacher preparation during the early eras of composition were “working toward spreading an understanding of composition designed to infiltrate traditionally resistant populations”

(11)—that is, literature graduate students who did not want to teach composition.

Unfortunately, despite tectonic disciplinary shifts in the ascension of rhetoric and composition as a dappled discipline (see Lauer; Vealey and Rivers) relevant and needed institutionally and professionally, the resonant thread of resistance rooted in sub- disciplinary identity battles remains active in more recent scholarship, too:

“Resisting the Faith: Conversion, Resistance, and the Training of

Teachers” (Welch, 1993)

“Teachers as Students, Reflecting Resistance” (Hesse, 1993)

“Negotiating Resistance and Change: One Composition Program’s

Struggle Not to Convert” (Powell et al., 2002)

Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of

Teaching Assistants (Barr Ebest, 2005)

“Resistance and Identity Formation: The Journey of the Graduate Student-

Teacher” (Grouling, 2015)

The titular emphasis on resistance tells, of course, only part of the story. As Grouling suggests in her recent article in Composition Forum (para. 2), scholars spend a great deal of time searching for causes to, and cures for, new teacher resistance, whether or not they give the term titular visibility. New teachers are represented as resisting a multitude of practices and activities: an unfamiliar or uncomfortable single-model pedagogy that clashes with their own entrenched views of writing (Farris, Subject to Change; Barr

Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach); the re-orienting of their own writing views to those held by their program administrators, typically via the conversion model (Welch; Powell et al.; Guerra and Bawarshi); the generic conventions and unfamiliar demands of academic writing at the graduate level (Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”; Reid, “Teaching

Writing Teachers Writing”); and the demands of institutional labor in an undervalued profession (Restaino; Rankin).

As a resonant thread in new teacher research, resistance may tell one story at work in teacher training. Composition as a field and individual writing programs did not create but inherited any number of stories that arose between disciplinary sub-fields, with literature faculty and (“their”) graduate students as the historically dominant group. When such disciplinary constructs intersect with the weight of undervalued institutional labor

(which Restaino traces in her monograph), many graduate student teachers may resist specific composition paradigms or practices as well as institutional and program

demands, and many WPAs may perceive any number of negative affective responses and behaviors as resistant (see Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach 6-9).12 While I do not believe that all, or even most, new teacher researchers portray new teachers as flatly resistant without additional context and characterization or that scholars intend to tell stories of resistance that label new teachers in harmful or unproductive ways, the persistence of resistance—and how we tie it narratively to newcomers—is still troubling as a resonant thread for several reasons. First, assuming or perceiving unproductive resistance as a given, repeated locus of study does invisible harm, no matter how unintentionally (see kyburz). Further, when we assume that newcomers approach teaching from a stance of resistance, we also assume we know how to recognize resistance and trace its source(s)—which I would argue we do not (cf Barr Ebest 6-9)— and spend a great deal of inquiry and energy looking for causes and cures to a problem perceived by those in power, rather than any number of troubles experienced by those whom WPAs have power over. Finally, it is too easy for any of us to fall into the narrative groove of evaluating individual newcomers as inexperienced teachers or novice graduate students and flattening their whole identities into these two dimensions—while not thoroughly foregrounding resistance as a recurring structural pattern that our educational and institutional cultures incite and reproduce. Barr Ebest briefly acknowledges that our educational culture is still entrenched systematically in discourses

12 Via Kearney and Plax’s research of resistance in undergraduate student populations, Barr Ebest shares a list of “student resistance techniques,” including avoiding interactions, failing or refusing to complete assignments, making excuses, challenging teacher authority, or rejecting teacher advice (6-9). These behaviors can disrupt classroom harmony—and can be reflected upon and discussed to improve classroom practice, as Barr Ebest notes. My bigger point of contention is how much new teacher scholarship begins by looking for causes for such behavior in ways that reveal more about our disciplinary concerns than about teachers as whole individuals whose experiences go beyond our discipline, programs, and institutions. 24

of mastery and knowing and that any pedagogies that challenge this will likely meet with resistance; yet resistance remains an unproductive but ever-present force in her work as well as in others’. Despite repeated feminist WPA calls for attention to ethics of care and deep rhetorical listening (kyburz; Jukuri; Restaino; Rickly and Herrington; Ratcliffe and

Rickly, “Introduction”), much well-intentioned, oft-cited scholarship (including Barr

Ebest’s and others cited here whose work I have built on) is laced with affective judgments about individuals’ dispositions13 without more nuanced understandings of how our highly charged, asymmetrical institutional power structures we have inherited (and still reproduce) are also culturally responsible for conflict and resistance. Just as importantly, the thread of resistance is only one thread that, in taking up so much space in our stories of new teachers, allows us as a field to look for and at resistance rather than any other number of reactions of new teachers as a disciplinary social group.

Sometimes tied causally to resistance, writing is another resonant thread in new teacher research. 14 Though scholars articulate slightly different objects and sources of resistance, many seem to return to conclusions that resistance to teaching can be a result of resistance to writing, whether to certain writing practices (Farris, “Too Cool for

School?”; Juzwik et al.; Reid, “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing”), language

13 For example, for all its merits—and I see many—Barr Ebest’s write-up of her study includes value judgments about individual participants, clearly visible in her subheadings, which include “Daddy’s Girl,” “Antifeminist,” and “Mr. Negative” to describe three GTAs, and “In Control,” “Out of Control,” and “Out of Her Element” to label their relationships to teaching in ways that I am hard-pressed to find as helpful as the rest of her analysis. 14 The majority of new teacher research in writing studies is primarily grounded in issues of the “teaching of writing,” a collocational phrase that is helpful in its situatedness but also then entangles and conflates issues of teaching with issues of writing. This also situates teaching as a professional activity in already problematic disciplinary conversations about writing— specifically, about academic writing and first-year writing, two particularly strong threads in our field that are often unmarked norms in new teacher research and enculturation practices. 25

perspectives (Powell et al.; Rodrigue), or academic writing authority or expertise (Camp;

Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”). For instance, in his Braddock award-winning article, Dylan

B. Dryer explicitly identifies resistance to the practicum as a “given” and posits teachers’ resistance to academic writing as a likely, underexplored cause: “On the whole, GTA resistance to the practicum may be a given, but we have not located that resistance in the deep ambivalence these self- and institutionally designated teachers feel toward the academic writing conventions they have been charged to teach” (423). Through corpus analysis of an interview study, Dryer draws a correlation between new teachers’ struggles with academic writing and their struggles with their writing students, arguing that new graduate student teachers at his institution “expressed considerable anxiety about—and frequent hostility toward—academic writing conventions and then projected disconcertingly reductive versions of these anxieties and writing practices onto students”

(421).

Many new teacher researchers would seem to concur with Sally Barr Ebest’s opening gambit in Changing the Way We Teach that, “despite its ubiquity, the role of writing is rarely discussed in relation to the professional development of graduate students” (5). As she contends, faculty often expect graduate students to know how to write graduate-level academic discourse and do not often enact or model the skills and moves they expect (either in their own writing or their writing pedagogy), which both maintains thinly veiled faculty authority and shifts the locus of responsibility for any failure onto students (Barr Ebest 58-59). To counter this unproductive situation, Barr

Ebest suggests that new teachers practice the process pedagogies that we espouse as a field but do not often enough practice in graduate courses (in her study, that course is the

practicum) (21). Other new teacher researchers offer even more specific suggestions for writing assignments. In “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing,” E. Shelley Reid advocates for practicum writing assignments for new teachers that are “overtly, deliberately difficult, exploratory, and critically reflective” in order for new writing teachers to be

“true learners” (W198, emphasis in original). Likewise, Dryer concludes that graduate student teachers need to write more difficult, critically reflective writing that de- routinizes their own writing practices in order to articulate internalized beliefs about writing (441-444), offering a list of suggestions that might hope to “deroutinize the practices [specific] genres make commonsensical, transparent, or otherwise beneath notice” (442).

The correlation that new teacher researchers seem to seek between ambivalence and confidence toward writing and toward teaching directs us to one potential area of inquiry in which we might use our disciplinary expertise to intervene in newcomers’ struggles. Within the resonant thread of writing, new teacher researchers weave together their own teaching and administrative lore and qualitative research along with extensive bodies of disciplinary knowledge about genre, academic writing, assessment, portfolios, and writing process pedagogies, to name a few. Further, a focus on the situated teaching of college writing is needed in writing studies, especially considering that the only other body of teacher education scholarship comes from K12 education and focuses on literacy education (including reading and writing) in vastly different situated contexts. Yet, any correlation we seek to make between feelings about teaching and feelings about writing is one correlation rather than the only one; and positing certain aspects of academic writing as both the cause of and cure for new teacher resistance is not a given—it is a disciplinary

construct that shapes our thinking in invisible ways we have internalized. As a field, we should all be wary of one of the implicit uber-narratives of our discipline, which Thomas

Newkirk astutely identifies in one simple notion: that writing is the hero of writing

(Performance of Self 14). Newkirk juxtaposes this motif with its use in undergraduate student writing—which he is clear to explain that we would often dismiss as an overdetermined narrative. Yet our own implicit assumptions about writing deserve explicit scrutiny as well as equal generosity. The activity of academic writing is a vital theoretical commitment of ours, and it does have power—but that power has its affordances, in which I include benefits and limitations. Writing has power to create and perpetuate as well as abate complex issues of expertise and authority built into our academic cultural structures for teaching and learning. By ascribing agency to our primary disciplinary object and means of study, we privilege writing as the uninterrogated central actor in power. In doing so, we authorize writing to serve as the perpetual villain in newcomers’ minds until it can be re-articulated as hopeful hero in or through new teacher or writing program research or practice. Thus, while new teacher researchers’ vested theoretical and disciplinary commitments to writing might illuminate some intersections of graduate students and graduate-level academic writing (typically in the practicum), research narratives in which the problem of and solution to new teacher resistance are tied to writing efface other learning curves that new teachers experience and subordinate other human and institutional relationships surrounding teaching as a complex professional activity.

Finally, woven in and among the above threads of training, resistance, and writing is another thread of continual interest: identity. While some scholars focus on new

teachers’ experiences in the dual roles of Student and Teacher (Hesse; Restaino; Brown;

Grouling), others look to new teachers’ understandings of themselves as academic writers, as in the studies mentioned above but foregrounding identities (Skorczewski,

“From Playing a Role”), sometimes in relation to writing (Camp). Other scholars emphasize teachers’ newness, digging into the complexities of their positions as novices to the field who have minimal teaching experience (if any) and minimal practice theorizing from any teaching experience they do have (Rodrigue; Powell et al.; Dryer,

“At a Mirror Darkly”). Some researchers focus explicitly on certain aspects of identity;

Barr Ebest’s study is the clearest example, in which she began by selecting participants by gender even though her monograph ends with conclusions about age and years of teaching experience. Otherwise, new teacher identities are primarily tied to sub- disciplinary positions (literature, creative writing, composition, or less often English education).

While the above perspectives are certainly part of any study of new teacher identity, they also tell only part of any teacher’s identity story, in ways that tend to focus on what matters to us as a discipline rather than beginning with a more complex approach toward new teachers as human beings whose identities precede and exceed the bounds of any one discipline, domain, or activity. For instance, a focus on single or dual roles of

Writer, Student, and Teacher elides not only other roles but also other domains outside of teaching or academic writing performance. Further, some research in this thread often situates identities and prior experiences as hindering newcomers’ effectiveness as writing instructors rather than a more complex understanding of identities as both enabling and constraining (Rankin; Farris, Subject to Change; Ritchie and Wilson; Barr Ebest,

Changing the Way We Teach; Reid, “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing”; Camp)

(explored in more depth in Chapter Three). For example, new writing teachers’ prior knowledge of and feelings about writing are portrayed as narrow or restrictive or a teacher’s idealization of an authoritarian teacher as problematic (Ritchie and Wilson 40).

While labeling new teachers as novices may seem a value-neutral “given” for newcomers to the field, it can also create and perpetuate negative affective positions and slot newcomers into troubling identity positions because the still-entrenched binary pairing is

“expert.” In addition, by rendering present identities and practices as often hindered by past experiences, new teacher research that foregrounds the past can too often occlude possible futures and newcomers’ desired trajectories for their teaching lives and identities, thus not attending to the long view of teacher development (as Catherine

Latterell suggests we too often do within our structures of training). New teacher researchers certainly understand that teachers’ identities are more complex than any single role or disciplinary label and that newcomers’ of course have much to learn about teaching as part of a new professional identity. However, such understandings can often be assumed to the point of implicit invisibility and, in any case, are not necessarily accompanied by a generous and generative stance toward new teachers as still-authorized students and lifelong learners who bring in uneven but dynamically active knowledge and experiences.

Ultimately, I do not contend that any of these threads individually is untrue or unfounded, but that these four resonant threads—training, resistance, writing, and identity—take up a great deal of space in the history of inquiry into new writing teacher education. Unfortunately, these threads shape, represent, and reproduce what we take as

“givens” rather than constructs—just as studying certain kinds of documents or privileging perspectives of those in power is more likely to lead us to frame our research in ways that maintain the primacy of program training and the deficiency of new teachers within our structures for training. So I remain way of both what and how we have studied new writing teachers. I am wary of the presence of these threads that resonate with me because I believe we can learn to tell better kinds of stories—because we have already learned to restory our disciplinary and (albeit to a lesser extent) institutional narratives about undergraduate student writers. To revisit Journet’s question, I am wary of how much we have rooted new teacher research in our own disciplinary, theoretical, and cultural commitments to program training and academic writing in ways that have over time—however unintentionally—been interwoven with narratives of unproductive resistance and narrow slices of identity. And I am wary of how these four threads direct our attention not only to certain aspects of new teacher education, but also away from others. It is difficult to enact research that foregrounds new teachers as learners without historically concomitant assumptions about them as not-knowers or resistant students who need targeted training; it is also difficult to situate learning as a generative, productive, motivated activity that precedes, exceeds, and infuses our authorized structures of writing teacher education; and perhaps it is even antithetical to our educational mission not to assume that teacher identities are primarily mediated or motivated by program training, composition paradigms, or academic literacies. Yet these are the stories we need to learn to tell.

How might we restory new teacher research?

The above threads woven through new teacher research stories have, over time, created grooves into which it is easy for us to slide our thinking and research design about what we should look at in order to study new writing teachers as well as how we should look. One of the most remarkable consequences of such a continual (re)telling, which this project addresses and redresses, is how the threads we have woven over time between certain aspects of training, resistance, writing, and identities overshadow some of the other mediational and motivational contexts involved in the complex activities of newcomer learning and identity learning—two foundational concepts not often enough

(singularly, much less simultaneously) foregrounded in new writing teacher research. It is particularly vital for us, as a field, to learn to restory recurring disciplinary narratives because the stories we tell have power to proleptically call new teachers into unproductive identity positions (however unintentionally) that are rife with consequences—institutional and professional, affective and material—especially in relation to the audience for new teacher research: the more experienced teacher-scholars who teach and supervise them. If we do not restory our own historical leanings, then the continued (re)telling of certain threads in published research allows us as a field to elide other more generative stories that are equally true and could potentially work toward more agentive positions for newcomers and for us all.

One way for restorying, which my project both advocates for and enacts, is narrative as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology that destabilizes some of our well- worn narrative grooves by telling other kinds of new teacher-generated stories, and then theorizes those stories and experiences using theories of learning and identity from within

and beyond writing studies. As we learn to restory ourselves and our field away from the limiting focus of training, resistance, writing, or “new”/flattened identities—even while honoring what they help us to illuminate—it is also vital that we move toward making new teacher learning visible and valued, instead of focusing on what newcomers don’t know, won’t do, and why. In addition to understandings and feelings about writing, implicit theories about learning and education are also at work in the writing classroom and beyond. New teachers’ unstated epistemologies and lifelong experiences influence how they learn to be/come writing teachers, and their actions as complex individuals who are more than Teachers or Writers are mediated and motivated by more than composition theories of writing can account for or trace. New writing teachers, thus, need to be studied and understood by relying on research-based interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity, which I operationalize in this study via narrative (see Chapter Two).

Chapter Map

In Chapter Two, “Narrative as a Methodology for Tracing New Writing Teacher

Identity Learning,” I begin by establishing the frameworks, key terms, and paradigms that shape my study design. I explicate the methodologies and methods for my year-long

(and continuing) storied and document-based interview study of five graduate students who are new writing teachers seemingly beginning in “the same place,” where they experienced their first teacher education within the same program and with the same administrator. This chapter describes in detail how I use narrative as both an object and means of analysis to study newcomer identity learning—which is both a gap that needs to

be addressed in new teacher research (object) and a way to learn to tell different kinds of disciplinary stories (means) and to leave those stories open and ongoing.

The stories that the subsequent three chapters tell are not quite Margaret Wolf’s

Thrice-Told Tale, in which she offers “one story” in three vastly different genres for different audiences (i.e., field notes, fictional story, academic article). But they are

“telling” of three different means of studying, and three perspectives on, new teacher identity learning—via complex laminated identities, educational histories, and scripts for learning; recent classroom troubles to share with other newcomers; and preferred, motivated identities in motion in teacher texts composed with students in mind. In

Chapter Three, “Not Very Dead Poets Society,” I follow participants’ stories of teaching and learning across different times in their lives, relying on Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s conceptualization of laminated identities. Using thematic analysis of teaching roles, I trace newcomer identities as multimediated and multimotivated over time and across domains of activity, in ways that are not bound to a single term, a single institutional space, or a seemingly singular pedagogical stance toward writing. By tracing new teachers’ laminated identities, I show how participants in my study have learned and do enact complex, robust scripts for how learning works based on their reflective assessments of how learning has worked for them in the past.

In Chapter Four, “Telling Troubles,” I examine narrative trajectories and affective responses in and across participants’ “stories to share” with other new writing teachers, relying on (and troubling) Jerome Bruner’s conception of Troubles as well as other cognitive and social psychologists’ theories of narrative, affect, and agency. Interweaving thematic and structural analysis, I look not just at what tellers say but also how they say

it, particularly in participants’ bad experiences to share with other newcomers, which they do not experience as overdetermined narratives of triumph or defeat. By examining participants’ retellings of self-identified moments of trouble, I illuminate participants’ struggles with spoken face-to-face interaction with students, which education researchers refer to as teacher talk but which is notably absent as an area of inquiry in new teacher research and preparation in writing studies.

In Chapter Five, “Motivated Identities in Motion,” I trace the relationships between participants’ perceived and desired teaching identities, especially as elicited in relation to storied talk about texts composed with students in mind (e.g., lecture notes, course websites) rather than those intended for programmatic or institutional use (e.g., teaching philosophies, syllabi). Beginning by examining linguistic markers of actual and designated identities, I triangulate narrative theories of identity from Anna Sfard and

Anna Prusak, Clandinin and Connelly’s educational research in narrative inquiry, and teacher text analysis to illuminate the role of participants’ desires and motivations in directing their future actions and teaching identities. By tracing both talk and texts—and the relationships between them—I consider how storied talk surrounding teacher texts intended for students points to students not only as an audience for those texts but also as a complex mediational, motivational force in teacher identity learning often understudied in new teacher research.

In Chapter Six, I return to one of the central (and twofold) questions of this project: How do newcomers learn to be and become writing teachers—and how do we know (or not)? As Gesa Kirsch is careful to point out in Women Writing the Academy,

“As is the case with any research that explores new territory, conclusions need to be

drawn carefully, if at all. I raise questions more often than I provide answers in hopes of encouraging multivocal dialogue among researchers, scholars, and teachers” (xix). I maintain that eliciting and listening deeply to participants’ stories of teaching and learning has taught me a great deal about what I have already internalized as a more experienced teacher, researcher, and administrator; and I firmly believe that, as a field, we can all learn from their collected stories. I also believe that narrative is a robust methodology with affordances left to explore, including offering multiple interpretations of complex events and using empirical research to complicate and defer our drives toward certainty or simplification. Thus, my conclusion does not seek to offer prescriptive pedagogical practices for faculty in charge of new teacher preparation or for individual writing teachers within our programs. I hope instead that sitting with the highly situated, diversely mediated stories of these five new writing teachers might help us all (re)consider the practices, paradigms, and stances we invoke and rely on in our own localized programs—which are not just about and in relation to writing, disciplinarity, and knowledge-making, but are also deeply about and shape teaching, learning, and relationship-building across human and institutional activities.

Historically, a great deal of new teacher research has enabled us to tell stories about how we teach new teachers even as they have also constrained us in telling only certain kinds of stories, too few of which foreground how new teachers learn or learn to be/come teachers both in and over time. In 2002, Yancey asked a question that we still have yet to answer as a field: “What other kinds of needs would we identify for TA development if our central concern were not [the local exigence of specific programs or student populations, or their structures for training] but TA development more

generally?” (“Professionalization” 64). My study does not seek to offer prescriptive practices for new teacher research either, but to ask instead: How might we inquire differently into new teacher identity learning and development, in order to tell much- needed stories about how situated professional learning and development work? Such stories are not just about learning to teach, but learning to be and become a writing teacher as part of our professional identities now and in the future, in ways that are not tied to any one program, paradigm, or institution. Just as importantly, an approach to studying identity learning and long-term development is one way to foreground teachers’ stories and what they can tell us about individual learning, rather than framing narrative as a means of telling the stories of composition in which the field stands in as the primary object and agent (as is the titularly stated goal of Richard Haswell and Min-Zhan Lu’s

Comp Tales: An Introduction to College Composition through Its Stories). Ultimately, I maintain that listening rhetorically to newcomers’ narratives is one way to make what is overly familiar in the teaching of writing just strange enough to those of us who have already internalized so much of what we do and who we are. In doing so, narrative inquiry into new writing teachers can help us move toward the still and perpetually unknown questions about how we learn to be/come without coming to any singular conclusion or beginning from historically privileged “given” stances: How do we learn to be and become writing teachers? And how do we learn to do and be/come when so much is new?

CHAPTER TWO

NARRATIVE INQUIRY AS METHOD AND METHODOLOGY FOR TRACING

NEW WRITING TEACHERS’ IDENTITY LEARNING

“The ways of paying attention to (encountering or interpreting) narrative are infinite. But, the ways of paying attention determine what you are able to see.” —David Schaafsma and Ruth Vinz, with Sara Brock, Randi Dickson, and Nick Sousanis, On Narrative

Inquiry: Approaches to Language and Literacy Research, p. 78, emphasis in original

“…understanding means listening to discourses not for intent but with intent—with the intent to understand not just the claims but the rhetorical negotiations of understanding as well… rhetorical listeners might best invert the term understanding and define it as standing under, that is, consciously standing under discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all our particular—and very fluid—standpoints.

Standing under discourses means letting discourses wash over, through, and around us and then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics.” —Krista Ratcliffe,

Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, p. 28, emphasis in original

Rather than assume as “givens” some of the threads woven (however implicitly and unintentionally) through new teacher research, I seek to destabilize what we think we

know by asking instead for the storied perceptions and experiences of new writing teachers. By “standing under” the explicit in participant stories—as Krista Ratcliffe argues we must do to practice rhetorical listening—I seek to learn and “under-stand” what is implicit, absent, internalized, uncertain, and unknown. From the stories in my corpus, I ask: What can new teachers do? Why do they do it? What knowledge and support do new teachers need? Who do they want to become? And how are they learning to be and become writing teachers in our field right now? Listening to newcomers’ stories

“with intent” to reveal and take generative stances toward their experiences and learning,

I also recursively use narrative as both an object and means of analysis to pay attention differently (as Schaafsma et al. suggest) in order to shape what and how I see new writing teachers in our field right now, as one possible way to learn to tell different kinds of disciplinary stories and to leave those stories open and ongoing.

In this chapter, I explicate the disciplinary and methodological rationale for my year-long (and continuing) storied and document-based interview study of five graduate students who are new writing teachers beginning their teacher education within the same program. In the following sections, I situate our methodological need to study new teacher identity learning via narrative inquiry. I first define key terms and frameworks that have informed my research design and analysis: narrative, story, narrative inquiry, identity, learning, and identity learning. Then, I describe my study, including relevant program contexts, participant selection, and methods of data collection and analysis.

Finally, I share two stories from each participant as well a version of my own research story to open the question of how my own experiences have shaped my thinking and actions in this project.

Narrative Inquiry as a Methodology in the Human Sciences

Narrative

My working definition of narrative is both simply stated and endlessly complex. I understand narrative as a human activity of making meaning15 out of experience, in keeping with characterizations of narrative found in literature, linguistics, anthropology, and psychology16 and more recently deployed in history and sociology as well.17

Formalistic definitions of narrative often emphasize temporality and sequentiality in relation to audience (Ochs and Capps 57; Riessman 3)—formal features that are deeply intertwined with narrative’s rhetorical function. On narrative’s function, sociologist

Catherine Kohler Riessman makes two vital points. In general, narrative constructions of the past incite future action (see also Sfard and Prusak 18; Addison); and specifically in anthropology, the function of narrative is to “initiate and integrate new members and maintain continuity” (Riessman 70). Each of these concepts—action, enculturation, continuity—are vital to my rationale for selecting narrative to study writing teacher identity learning with implications for administrator and teacher action as well as professional enculturation both in and over time (taken up in Chapter Six).

15 I also deliberately use “meaning” rather than “sense” to describe what we use narrative to “make,” which I describe in the next chapter. Though I think both are likely true and productive, I take “meaning” to be a broader, more complex term not flattened out by the weight of Westernized patriarchal histories pushing toward specific trajectories of trying to “make” what becomes marked as rational “sense” in a limited way. 16 See H. Porter Abbott’s Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Charlotte Linde’s Life Stories, Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps’ Living Narrative: Creating Lives in Everyday Storytelling, Catherine Reissman’s Narrative Methods for Human Sciences, and Jerome Bruner’s extensive body of narrative research. 17 See Maynes, Pierce, and Laslett’s Telling Stories: The Use of Personal Narratives in the Social Sciences and History; and Frank’s Letting Stories Breathe: A Socio-Narratology. 40

Deeper still than rhetorical form and function, narrative is also epistemological and phenomenological. It is a way of knowing (in) the world (see Polkinghorne’s

Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences) and a means of understanding and evaluating self, world, and self in relation to world (Bruner “Self-Making and World-

Making”). As an act of interpretational meaning-making (Bruner Acts of Meaning; Actual

Minds, Possible Worlds), narrative is not only a way of knowing but a core way of experiencing everyday reality as we create and reproduce it (Bruner, “The Narrative

Construction of Reality”) and as we perceive, understand, and make meaning from a multitude of experiences that are recombinatorial in and over time. Using lenses of narrative research in the human sciences means enacting fundamental understandings of narrative as an active process of interpretation and meaning-making inflected by both stories and the acts of storytelling that serve as mediational, motivational forces between understanding and practice. In other words, telling stories of who we are and who we want to be shapes who we are and who we want to be in powerful, compelling ways.

Story

Often, narrative scholars and researchers—including many of those cited above

(and me)—do not make clear distinctions between narrative and story, instead using them interchangeably as Riessman makes explicit (3-7) and others demonstrate in practice. For instance, in Engaging in Narrative Inquiry, Clandinin writes, “the word narrative carries a kind of currency. It invokes people’s imagination that perhaps something different will be understood, something that cannot be understood by other research methodologies.

Such is the power of narrative and story” (214). Scholarly definitions of story are often

similar to narrative definitions above, in terms of both form and function. Riessman, for example, suggests that story is one kind of narrative with sequencing and temporal ordering, with some moment of trouble or rupture that provokes a reaction in the teller

(6). Similarly underscoring story’s rhetorical function in relation to specific speakers and listeners, Linde defines a story as a discourse unit that is tellable, entails retelling, and has reportability because of its deviation from a norm (21). Bruner, too, maintains that the function of story is “to find an intentional state that mitigates or at least makes comprehensible a deviation from a canonical cultural pattern” (Acts of Meaning 49-50, emphasis mine).

For my purposes in this study, though I too may follow suit and at times use narrative and story interchangeably, I privilege the term story, as evidenced in my project title and in the previous chapter. Generally, I find useful Riessman’s suggestion that story is one kind of narrative, with similar generic form (temporality, sequentiality) and rhetorical function (for a teller, in relation to a listener). Specific to my project, stories of teaching and learning are certain kinds of narratives I have elicited from participants; and usually they involve tellers working through (or not) moments of trouble or rupture that mean something to them. However, Linde and Bruner’s definitions of story point to other aspects of my foundational understanding of story. First, an interview study that elicits stories “on demand” from an interviewer complicates tellability and reportability in different ways than Linde’s work in oral history and life stories (similar to other linguists’ work in conversation analysis). And second, I do not adhere to the construction that stories are a means of understanding or reporting deviations from norms or “a canonical cultural pattern.” As a feminist, I want to invest no energy in the terministic trap of

canons or norms. While narrative research may still try to elucidate stories’ and tellers’ relationships with cultural patterns, there is always more than one culture at work in every story and its telling; so it would seem that “deviations” from any one culture or pattern will be omnipresent, which renders the label futile. Suggesting that stories are means of making sense of deviations also conflicts with a broader understanding of narrative as a means of making meaning out of all experience. Embodied experience is better understood as endlessly complex and deliciously messy, rather than in terms of deviations and norms. And while participants’ stories from my study can be interpreted as abounding with moments of trouble or rupture, participants themselves often do not think even those stories “entail retelling” or are “reportable,” or often find themselves compelled to tell a story that ends with a caveat—“I’m not sure why I just told you that story”—in ways that complicate any singular definition of story that relies on a specific codified rhetorical function.

Narrative inquiry

In addition to reverberating across linguistics, psychology, anthropology, and literature, narrative resonates in education as a substantive area of research; specifically, narrative inquiry in education is a robust methodology for studying teachers’ narrative ways of knowing and experiencing their lives and teaching identities (Clandinin

Engaging in Narrative Inquiry; Webster and Mertova; Schaafsma, Vinz, Brock, Dickson, and Sousanis; Clandinin and Connelly, Narrative Inquiry and “Stories to Live by:

Narrative Understandings of School Reform”; Connelly and Clandinin “Narrative

Understandings of Teacher Knowledge”).18 As Clandinin explains, in narrative inquiry, researchers engage in narrative as both an object and means of analysis, thinking not just about stories but with stories (29) “as a way to both understand experience as a narrative construction and as a way to understand how we might study experience understood in that way” (47). Narrative inquiry is built on several principles of qualitative and feminist research methods: careful attention to entry, exit, and transparency throughout the process; enacting understandings of participants as knowers and collaborators, for instance via multiple interpretations and negotiating composition of texts with participants; and ethical practices that include confidentiality and care with an emphasis on not evaluating individuals as teachers or as human beings (Clandinin 135).

Just as importantly, as a methodology, narrative inquiry begins with assumptions—with intent—that are relevant and beneficial for understanding both learning and identities. As Clandinin and Connelly posit in Narrative Inquiry, “formalists begin inquiry in theory, whereas narrative inquirers tend to begin with experience as expressed in lived and told stories” (40, emphasis mine). In addition to relying on experience to appropriately investigate narrative as a phenomenological force, narrative inquiry emphasizes the fluidity and temporality of experience:

18 Narrative inquiry is present in writing studies, too, as in Joanne Addison’s “Narrative as Method and Methodology” chapter in Practicing Research in Writing Studies. Addison’s working definition of narrative inquiry does align well with characterizations from education scholars: narrative inquiry as a diachronic, systematic means of empirical research, rooted in case study, with narrative as one valuable kind of data triangulated with others. However, Addison seems to rely on (rather than debunk) the traditional narrative structural model provided by Labov and Waletsky in 1967, long criticized particularly by feminist linguists as a reductive, ungenerative singular model of narrative analysis (see also Frank Chapter One “Capacities of Stories,” 20-44, for issues with Labov). Further, writing studies scholarship in narrative inquiry as a specific methodology—not to be conflated with narrative analysis—is limited compared to the body of research in education that not only theorizes narrative inquiry but also offers detailed methodological transparency. 44

Part of the narrative inquirer’s doubts come from understanding that they

need to write about people, places, and things as becoming rather than

being. Their task is not so much to say that people, places, and things are

this way or that way but that they have a narrative history and are moving

forward. The narrative research text is fundamentally a temporal text—

about what has been, what is now, and what is becoming. (Clandinin and

Connelly 145-46, emphasis in original)

This becoming is not only an object but also a means itself to a deeper understanding of narrative as phenomenologically sustaining: “Narrative inquirers understand that a person’s lived and told stories are who they are, and who they are becoming, and that a person’s stories sustain them” (Clandinin 200, emphasis mine). Narrative inquiry assumes at the outset that stories sustain people and privileges the phenomenological power of stories in everyday life. As I shared in the epigraph to the last chapter, Restaino suggests, “In the end, the best stories we tell are the ones that connect us to each other”

(17). My intent with this project is to show how more generative stories of learning and identity learning might better connect us all as teachers (though my focus here is clearly on the smaller social group of newcomers) and sustain us in ways that transcend tales of disciplinary troubles, educational deficits, or academic critique. Thus, narrative inquiry also aligns with my feminist aim of challenging dominant stories in power. If “thinking narratively about a phenomenon challenges the dominant story of phenomenon as fixed and unchanging” (Clandinin 38) at the meta level, then thinking narratively can also help

us challenge the dominant stories that have become, over time, assumed as givens rather than constructs.19

Of course, narrative inquiry as a methodology also involves several challenges that are vital to acknowledge here and continue to be wary of as I continue narrative research. First and foremost, the living out of complex—multiple, shifting, situated— narratives is difficult to trace and analyze while keeping interpretation open rather than closed (Clandinin 165-66), especially considering our deeply entrenched, often invisible academic and human histories of adhering to and longing for narrative coherence and quick clarity. Narrative inquiry’s methodological assumptions emerged in response to narrative theorists’ historical adherence to several “grand narratives” of human experience, such as causality, coherence, and certainty (Clandinin and Connelly

Narrative Inquiry 28-45).20 However, like any way of knowing or being, complex understandings of narrative are easier to espouse than to enact in study design and implementation. Contemporary researchers might take as a given that narrative as a terministic screen assumes multiplicity and fragmentation, keeping us engaged with the uncertain and the unknown rather than resolving our doubts; however, weaving in deep understandings of—and comfort with—such uncertainty and unknowing requires researchers to intervene in our own learned human desires for coherence and causality

19 For instance, Clandinin and Connelly note that narrative inquiry works against the tentacles of some methodological “grand narratives” that ensnare and entangle us in certain assumptions: that we have accurate language to describe what we see, that behavior is observable for what we want to study, that numerical and causal thinking are privileged, and that we need to look at the macro level and within a synchronic point of view in order to illuminate and “fully” understand phenomena (Narrative Inquiry 25). 20 Tracing the evolution of narrative research is outside of my scope here, and previous scholars have detailed such work in depth elsewhere (see Riessman 14-17; Clandinin 32-45; Schaafsma, Vinz, Brock, Dickson, and Sousanis 22-24). 46

that persist despite our lived realities of multiplicity and experienced lack of clear causality in our everyday lives.

The above challenge is also exacerbated by issues of representation both in and over time. A noted trouble in narrative inquiry is finding representational forms for research (Clandinin 165-66). This struggle is twofold at minimum in this project: while I attempt here to “represent [participants’] storied lives in storied ways, not to represent storied lives as exemplars of formal categories” (Clandinin 141), I do so within the generic and institutional expectations of a print-based, page-based academic dissertation—certainly not the only or most appropriate means of participant representation. And this narrative trouble is joined by another: that living, telling, retelling, and reliving21 stories unfolds slowly, taking a great deal of time during which both researchers and participants continue to change (Clandinin 51). Such change over time is difficult to trace, to bound, and to represent, especially considering the longitudinal goals of my project that exceed what can be present in this dissertation document.

Finally, Clandinin points to the challenge of being vulnerable as narrative inquiry researchers (165-66), a salient difficulty in the enactment of this project largely in relation to my own complex positionality. At the time of my study, I was a new qualitative researcher and graduate student administrator and a teacher with seven years of experience—a mix of “new” and “just old enough” for participants to perceive my authority and expertise in ways that I cannot possibly have identified or traced. Right now, I am also a relative newcomer to the field voicing deep concerns not about how new

21 These are terms Clandinin and Connelly use in their work and that I unpack as needed, primarily in Chapter Four. 47

teachers teach—but about how we seem to have constructed new writing teachers as a social group. In addition to the vulnerability of my stance as a researcher is the issue of complicity that Clandinin points to, which will make me differently vulnerable as a researcher, administrator, and mentor in the future: “as narrative inquirers we are part of present landscapes and past landscapes, and we acknowledge that we helped make the world in which find ourselves” (82). For now, I have certainly helped make the research world in which my participants find themselves, with consequences that I will likely not be able to locate with much certainty; in the future, my continued participation in the field—as a researcher, teacher, teacher educator and mentor, and writing program administrator—will only add to the possibilities for my complicity in reproducing unproductive stories rather than destabilizing them, as I argue that we need to do. Yet my deepening awareness of these possibilities, at the outset of my foray into tenure-track faculty life, gives me hope. As Clandinin and Connelly suggest of narrative inquirers:

We have helped make the world in which we find ourselves. We are not

merely objective inquirers, people on the high road, who study a world

lesser in quality than our moral temperament would have it, people who

study a world we did not help create. On the contrary, we are complicit in

the world we study. Being in this world, we need to remake ourselves as

well as offer up research understandings that could lead to a better world.

(61)

Narrative inquiry in new writing teacher research

Narrative inquiry and analysis is a relatively common practice in linguistic anthropology, education, and oral history, particularly from feminist stances toward

narrative as a means of meaning-making for everyday people and a way to reveal and destabilize the privileged stories of those in power. Yet narrative inquiry as a complex methodology is seldom taken up in writing studies (Addison’s chapter is one exception).

In this project, I advocate for, and enact, narrative as a complex interdisciplinary feminist methodology needed in writing studies to study the tacit, long-term identity learning of those in any social group—particularly those not in power. In qualitative research in our field, we might analyze data using narrative theories but do not often enough elicit data narratively to learn what is “underneath” participant self-responses and to stand under the explicit in order to “under-stand” what’s implicit, internalized, uncertain, and unknown.

In new writing teacher research, narrative has been used as an object and means of analysis in new teacher preparation in the practicum: written narratives are elicited in journal writing or in-class writing in the practicum (Juzwik et al.), or new teachers are encouraged to conduct narrative case study research of the students in their first-year writing courses (Anson, Jolliffe, and Shapiro). Yet this sliver of narrative work is still entangled in our conflation of narrative with the “personal,” which devalues its social and cultural mediational power (as Debra Journet suggests we still do as a field; see

“Narrative Turns,” 15-17), and is situated as a targeted practice for new teacher preparation. While narrative inquiry can be used to attend to specific pragmatic concerns or implications, its main purpose is to focus on participants, their storied lives, and methodological arguments for revealing their storied lives and tellings (Clandinin 36). In doing so, narrative inquiry keeps researchers working toward participant retellings

(Clandinin and Connelly, Narrative Inquiry 71) as one way “to make sense of life as

lived” and “to figure out the taken-for-grantedness” (Clandinin and Connelly, Narrative

Inquiry 78)—even as the mysteries of resonant threads at work remain.

My purpose in using narrative inquiry is not primarily to look for, at, or through participants’ taken-for-grantedness; instead, it has been to begin (as in Chapter One) by looking for, at, and through the taken-for-grantedness of more experienced teacher- scholars who are new teacher researchers creating and reproducing certain kinds of stories about the newcomers they study and support. Throughout subsequent chapters, while I remain interested in making visible what new writing teachers take for granted that may be causing troubles for them in (and beyond) the writing classroom, I am far more invested in sharing newcomers’ complex stories of teaching and learning in order to illuminate what we as a field have taken for granted historically and—as I argue in

Chapter One—still today. Clandinin and Connelly maintain, “In narrative thinking, interpretations of events can always be otherwise” (Narrative Inquiry 31). My goal in this project (now and in the future) is to destabilize what stories we have told as a discipline that can be—and, in fact, are already—otherwise, or other than what we have learned to tell. The story that I want to contribute to telling, in order to do this work, is about new teacher identity learning.

Identity Learning

Identities

Some scholars (including many in new teacher research) wield identity as an oft- invoked god-term while others critique or avoid it, implicitly or explicitly suggesting it has outlived its usefulness; my biggest contention with any scholarly use of the term

identity is lack of clarity in defining and deploying it theoretically or methodologically.

Too often, we collocate identity with adjectives that ring true to us in theory and in practice: identities are fluid, dynamic, multiple, relational, interactional, and so on. But describing is not quite defining. Throughout this project, I rely on a more well-developed definition of identities from anthropologists Dorothy Holland, William Lachicotte, Jr., and Debra Skinner and psychologist Carole Cain in Identity and Agency in Cultural

Worlds that offers conceptions of what identities are and do (in phrasal form) based on their findings from career-long qualitative research studies. For Holland et al., identities are:

 self-understandings of who we tell ourselves we are that resonate with us

 improvisations using available cultural resources

 productions of past and present action that influence future action

 imaginings of self in worlds of action accomplished in and through social

activity (3-9)

In this configuration, identities are self-understandings that resonate with us as well as productions that direct action; and meaning-making is recruited and activated as a process when we each recognize available and encouraged paths of participation and understand ourselves in relation not only to other people and ourselves in the present and in the past, but also to who we want to become in the future. Drawing heavily on

Vygotsky, Holland et al. maintain that we bring our identities to bear on new situations, drawing on what we have learned about ourselves, our worlds, and the contexts of specific social activities.

While I put these still-slippery but also robust definitions of identity into action throughout the following chapters, here it is important to note three points. First, in addition to being and emerging from complex histories, our identities are also becoming and will shape complex futures; and learning is about both histories and futures, in ways that are inevitably inflected by multiple social group memberships and are impossible to disentangle with any sense of certainty and causality. So while I understand and appreciate identity as intersectional, I do not enter this project with a focused assumption about any specific, current social identities and a direct correlation to teaching identities—but I do not attempt to evade those complexities either. As Clandinin and

Connelly suggest:

In addition to culture, other formalistic inquiry terms in common usage are

race, class, gender, and power. Narrative inquirers, in developing or

explaining their work with other researchers, find themselves almost

inevitably at the formalistic inquiry boundary, as other researchers read

through their work for the formalistic terms that apply: a person is a

member of a race, a class, a gender, and may be said to have varying

degrees of power in any situation. Part of the tension for a narrative

inquirer is to acknowledge these truths while holding to a different

research agenda. (45)

My agenda here is to sit with the complexities of multiplicity—of both identities and narratives—in order to think about situated learning.

Second, in addition to the above understanding of identities more broadly, I also have a situated understanding of teaching identities more specifically. Teaching identities

are not formed primarily within authorized disciplinary sites of composition pedagogy or writing teacher education, to which the majority of new teacher research in writing studies has attended. New teacher identities begin long before a composition theory or pedagogy course, and they exceed our authorized structures both temporally and spatially as newcomers learn how to be/come writing teachers over time and across domains of activity. While we may know this to be true in both theory and in practice, our new teacher research and scholarship often privileges disciplinary enculturation as a social activity, suggesting that we have more mediational influence than perhaps we do (over enculturation, newcomer identities, or teaching practices).

Third and finally, if identities are self-understandings that we tell ourselves that resonate with us, then new teacher identities are always already narrativized in relation to stories of self, teaching, learning, acting, and being that shift not only in “reality” but also in our making meaning out of that “reality,” much of which is tacitly internalized and still unfolding both in and over time. While we have moved beyond identities on the possession model (something we “have” or don’t), I would argue that we are still stuck in the construction model (something we “build” or don’t),22 which suggests a level of explicit intention, agency, and conscious action that contradict how identity often functions tacitly in our lives. In this project, I understand identities as self-understandings that come to be and develop in and over time in ways that we do not always “construct” and that also do not just “construct” us in return. In other words, I assume that identities

22 For instance, even Wenger—whose work on learning has infused my own stances toward learning, identity, and meaning—relies on the metaphor of “building” identity in Communities of Practice (145). 53

are learned, not always when and where “we” say they should be—and that narrative is an inextricable part of the mediational, motivational process of identity learning.

Learning

Learning can also be a normed term whose definition is assumed rather than articulated. In this project, I use a basic definition of learning gleaned from Bruner in

Acts of Meaning—learning is understood as social participation authorized and sustained by culture (106)—unpacked via theories of learning from scholars in psychology and education often grounded in sociocultural activity theories. Following his work with Jean

Lave on situated learning, Wenger argues in Communities of Practice: Learning,

Meaning, and Identity that learning is an active process rather than a fixed target in a possession model of education; and that, because identity can be understood as a learning trajectory, identity can also be used as means of studying learning (see Chapter Six, 149-

163). As Wenger writes, “We define who we are by where we have been and where we are going” (149). Holland et al.’s definition of identities aligns with (and emerges from) sociohistorical views of learning and development in the situated contexts of tool use— wherein we understand tools as a capacious collection not just of present materials but also of the cultural resources that have preceded and co-developed with them (i.e.,

“artifacts, practices, and institutions”) (Prior 182; see also Prior, Chapter 7).

Sociohistorical theories of learning are predicated upon several premises about learning as temporal, mediational, and motivational (Engeström, Engeström, and

Vähäaho; Gutiérrez and Stone; Rogoff; Sfard and Prusak; Gee, Situated Language; Lave and Wenger; Wenger). First, learning is often tacit and dispersed unevenly over time.

Second, learning is a whole-person, context-driven activity, mediated by participation in multiple, shifting social groups and activities. And third, learning is a deeply motivated process. Wenger opens Communities of Practice by reminding us what learning is not, despite that institutions still treat it according to false understandings: learning is not individual without being social, is not neatly time-bound to semesters, is not discrete from meaningful life activities, is not the result of teaching (3). Taken together, these premises mean that learning is difficult to trace methodologically because it relies on meaningfulness (Wenger 4), an equally slippery term, and because learning draws on resources and identities from shifting memberships in multiple groups over time in relation to highly situated, unevenly motivated trajectories—including those that are desired, which means they haven’t happened yet. If we understand that we are motivated to learn to become who we want to be (and have not yet become, but are always in the process of becoming), then to study learning, we must also seek to understand the myriad factors involved in our motivations to pursue paths of participation toward the selves/ends that we desire. And while these paths need to be recognized by individual learners, they are not necessarily always those that are culturally encouraged or institutionally authorized.

Identity learning in new writing teacher research

The relationships between identity and learning are deeply interwoven and, therefore, impossible—and counterproductive—to disentangle. In this project, I seek to study identity learning, which I define as an active process (or processes) of developing self-understandings over time that resonate with individuals along situated trajectories

that those individuals tell themselves should be authorized and sustained by culture(s).

Such learning is always in relation to multiple, often conflicting cultures, each of which is unevenly but powerfully mediational and motivational. In other words, identity, learning, and narrative can all be understood as and along situated trajectories, and the function of narrative inquiry is to illuminate individuals’ trajectories in motion without reducing identities or learners via single conclusions or simple solutions—two pitfalls or “grand narratives” of identity and education research and commonplace understandings of how identities and education (should) work.

If individuals act based on often tacit, always narrativized understandings of who we think we want to be and should be—then new teacher research in writing studies should foreground three premises often elided or omitted that would help us move beyond our own program structures, our own writing theories, and our own disciplinary stories. First, learning to teach and be/come a writing teacher does not only or primarily occur within the bounds of authorized educational sites (e.g., the practicum), but rather across sites and over time. This learning happens in relation to the mediational influences of specific writing/graduate programs, faculty, and peers—and it also happens because of how individual teachers are motivated to learn to become certain kinds of teachers, scholars, and human beings as part of a broader conceptualization of professional identity. Further, such learning continues beyond a single semester or year in ways that deserve to be traced rather than black-boxed and assumed.

Second, to theorize teacher identity learning and development, we need to ground ourselves in interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity, getting in sync with contemporary research on how we learn. Though we are not experts in psychology

(cognitive, educational, or social), anthropology, or sociology, scholars in writing studies have an obligation to understand newcomers not just as writers and students but also as teacher-scholars who are complex human beings before, during, and after we come to play on the page, screen, or classroom “stage.” In other words, writing teachers (new or otherwise) are people who do not fit neatly or completely into our own disciplinary histories and theories of composing, which flatten even as they illuminate (see

Skorczewski, “Want to Tell a True Story about First-Year College Writing Programs?”); and to understand more about how we learn, we can continue to situate our research in relation to our deep disciplinary knowledge of writing as a complex mediational activity, but also need to take up and try on relevant interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity in order to ethically and intellectually pursue our proclaimed interests in issues of discourse and power in sites of teaching, learning, and literacy (see Williams). If we understand identities as learned, and we understand learning as a motivated act, then we must understand why it is that complex people learn to be/come the kind of complex teachers they become.

Finally, in addition to moving beyond our own structures and theories, we also need to move beyond our own disciplinary stories. In “The ‘Remembered’ Self,” Bruner suggests that “self is a perpetually rewritten story” in which we use memories of our past to buttress a well-formed narrative of self always in relation to “the cultural and language forms that specify the defining properties of a self” (53). On its face, Bruner’s claim buttresses my own assumption that any study of identity or self is a study of story. As a broader analogy, I would argue that a discipline is also a kind of self—a perpetually written story, with its own memories, its own well-formed narratives of self, its own

defining properties of what constitutes that self. Bruner further suggests that, “When new circumstances make the maintenance of that well formedness sufficiently difficult, we undergo turning points that clarify or ‘debug’ the narrative in an effort to achieve clearer meaning” (“The ‘Remembered’ Self” 53). As a discipline, we have certainly undergone countless turning points (see Journet “Narrative Turns” and “What Constitutes a Good

Story?”). However, my intent in studying newcomer identity learning is not to “clarify” or “debug” existing new teacher research narratives or to “achieve clearer meaning” for new teacher preparation. Instead, I aim to listen to newcomers’ stories not for intent, but with intent—as Ratcliffe suggests—to “make the maintenance of [any] well formedness sufficiently difficult” (Bruner, “The ‘Remembered’ Self” 53) for us to smooth over as a discipline. Newcomers’ stories of teaching and learning can be objects that reveal and shape stable-for-now teacherly identities; they can also be a means of studying identities as newcomers are learning them right now in ways that more experienced teacher- scholars no longer have access to, because we have normed and internalized so much of what we do and what we (think we) know. And it is my goal for this study—of stories, identities, learning, and identity learning—to be/come one of the “circumstances” that complicates rather than clarifies our “well-formedness” of new teacher research stories and keeps us from arriving at any singular sense of “clearer meaning.”

Study Description

Relevant Contexts: Graduate and Composition Programs

The University of Louisville (UofL) is a mid-size metropolitan research university. Situated within the College of Arts and Sciences, the Department of English is

home to approximately 223 undergraduate and 71 graduate students (38 MA, 33 PhD) as well as 36 full-time faculty and 27 part-time lecturers.23 Our two-year MA program offers a general English degree in which students are required to take literature courses (with traditional requirements mandated by era), and students may also specialize by taking elective courses in creative writing or rhetoric and composition. Our PhD program confers a doctoral degree specialized in rhetoric and composition, within which students may elect to take courses that vary from year to year and may include pedagogy, composition theory and administration, rhetorical theory, or literacy studies. UofL graduate students in English carry a rather heavy load of taking three graduate level seminars and teaching two courses in the Composition Program each term (and doctoral students also teach one course most summers). Collectively, graduate students teach approximately 40 percent of our writing courses each year.

During the time of my study, our WPA, or Director of Composition (DOC) was

Dr. Brenda Jo Brueggemann, who is also a member of my dissertation committee.

Brueggemann worked alongside and mentored three graduate student WPAs-in-training as Assistant Directors of Composition (ADCs), of which I was one during the term I conducted interviews. Together, this team is responsible for new teacher preparation and professional development very much in line with standard disciplinary practices. The program offers a week-long orientation for new teachers each Fall, which ends with a day-long orientation for all returning instructors, and one workshop each month based on instructor needs and interests. All funded MA and PhD students are required to take

ENGL 602: Teaching College Composition during their first semester of teaching at

23 Program statistics are from Spring 2016, the term during which I elicited the majority of stories that constitute the corpus for this part of my study. 59

UofL. Mentoring for new teachers occurs formally each week for the duration of 602.24

As WPA, Brueggemann taught each of my participants in their respective years of taking

602 (from 2013-2015), which ranged in topics from writing processes and responding to student writing, to teaching logistics and bad teaching days. During these years, 602 was designed to be an active learning space where new teachers worked in small groups to conduct research into recent composition scholarship and model teaching practices and lessons for FYC; and where new teachers also had structured opportunities to talk about teaching with new faculty, part-time lecturers, and graduate student peers and mentors, as well as Brueggemann as the course’s teacher of record and new teachers’ official faculty teaching mentor.

During their first UofL teaching year, graduate students teach the two first-year writing courses required of undergraduates (approximately 4,800 students each year) who have not earned the credit via another program-authorized equivalency. New graduate students are typically encouraged to use a common textbook and to follow a recommended sequence of assignments laid out in model syllabi; these are taken for granted as “givens” in 602. From 2013-2015, though the sequence of assignments was laid out, the selection of readings and writing of assignment descriptions was left to individual teachers, who were encouraged to co-author assignments and to use their mentors and other program teachers as resources.

24 Informal mentoring is often a staple for most graduate students, who are also assigned a program mentor (in addition to their ADC teaching mentor) who is a current MA or PhD student. 60

Participant Selection

At the beginning of my study, participants had five interrelated things in common: they were (1) new teachers who had between one and three years of teaching experience and were (2) current graduate students and writing instructors, (3) who taught for the first time in the same writing program, (4) where they also experienced their first new teacher education, (5) under the guidance and supervision of the same WPA. Like any rationale for participant selection, these choices reduce some variables (e.g., PhD students who have experienced teacher education in other programs) while still leaving open a host of variables and contexts to discover and discuss. New teacher researchers often study individuals within a single institutional site in order to conduct program research with immediate implications for new teacher preparation; by contrast, I elected to study newcomers experiencing their first authorized site of writing teacher education in the same program with the same WPA so that I could examine the differences in this perceived sameness (as individuals bring in vastly different personal histories of, and stances toward, teaching, learning, writing, and working) and to crack open some of the tacit assumptions in our own lore (e.g., program coherence is possible, program unity can be achieved however tentatively under the same WPA, and graduate students are marked as certain kinds of teacher-scholars based on their programs/institutions in stable rather than fluidly constructed ways).

My participants also, of course, have other complex differences and similarities, though it is not my intention to attach specific findings to typical, visible, or demographic identity categories (e.g., gender, race, class) because they are inextricably entangled in ways that aren’t easily or accurately flattened or simplified. Of the five instructors, two

are male, and three are female. Four are under the age of 30 and have generally come

“straight through” from undergrad to graduate level education as full-time students. Four identify as rhetoric and composition scholars; all identify as teachers, though with varying levels of (surprise in their) interest in teaching composition. All are also white, which speaks to the demographics that make up our MA population more so than our

PhD population25 and is a regrettable limitation of my study that does not allow me to represent experiences that are not all marked by the invisible privilege of whiteness in our educational system and our culture(s).26

Methods of Data Collection

Because learning often occurs tacitly and unconsciously—and because graduate students have been structured to perform “good student” and are likely to want to be

“good teachers” and, as I have found, “good research participants,” too—I did not design a study to elicit self-reported responses common in interview studies. Instead, during my year-long storied and document-based study, I elicited stories of teaching and learning that new writing teachers mark as memorable or seem to think “count” as stories worth telling me or sharing with others. Rather than ask directly what support new teachers need or what they learned from a specific experience, I wanted to listen to participants’

25 At the time of my study, our doctoral program was comprised of a somewhat more racially diverse group of graduate students, all of whom experienced their first writing teacher education in different programs—which would be an interesting addition to or extension of my study but which is not my focus for this dissertation. 26 After the first year-long interview portion of my study, graduate students in our program initiated meetings with faculty to advocate for recruitment, retention, and improved support for both graduate students and faculty of color in our department. It is one of my few regrets that, from its outset, my study did not seek to address and redress systemic institutional racial injustice; and while I am hopeful for the future of the program, sustainable change will take time that is well beyond the time of my dissertation study or my presence as a graduate student. 62

stories about memorable program moments, teaching experiences, educational histories, unexpected classroom events, even stories they would share with another new writing teacher before that person was about to teach for the first time. After observing and interacting with potential participants through a previous year-long pilot study (on digital media and composition pedagogy) and after observation of our practicum course, I invited five graduate student writing teachers to participate, all of whom accepted. I conducted three rounds of interviews over the course of four months, each an hour long and video recorded. 27 Altogether, 15 hours of interviews and 35 questions28 yielded 248 stories (based on Riessman’s definition as indicated earlier in this chapter) as the total corpus for this study.

In keeping with the methodological principles of narrative inquiry (Clandinin

134-143; Connelly and Clandinin, Teachers as Curriculum Planners; Addison) and qualitative research in writing studies (Kirsch and Sullivan; Mortensen and Kirsch), I paid careful attention to ethical research practices from the outset. I began each initial participant interview with a dialogue about the purpose of my study. In this opening off- camera dialogue, I asked participants to describe what they thought I was interested in doing or discovering; I then shared my version of my study’s aims, emphasizing that my purpose was to elicit stories that might tell me something about participants’ learning and teaching right now and how they learn and develop teaching identities over time. I aimed to be clear about my own understanding that participants were/are new to teaching and, like all teachers, have much to learn; and that their practices and learning (again, like all teachers) are constrained and enabled by time and available resources. Furthermore, I was

27 See Appendix A for relevant portions of IRB-approved study design and methods. 28 See Appendix B for all IRB-approved interview questions used for this dissertation. 63

explicit about what I was not doing: advocating for any single-model pedagogy (cf

Maxfield; Rose and Finders), imposing a singular pedagogical standard, or evaluating individuals’ practices in relation to any one model or standard despite my dual role as researcher and (then) graduate student WPA. I also noted that neither I nor any members of my committee/our program expected individuals’ stories or interview responses to align with any specific codified programmatic, departmental, institutional, or disciplinary aims.

Throughout the research process, I was careful to exceed the minimum ethical commitments of confidentiality and pseudonymity, though I could not promise total anonymity due to the process of working on campus with individuals from within my own institution and continuing to work with people who are (and likely will be) active, visible members of our field. In working with newcomers, I tried to be attentive of my own identities and power as a researcher, graduate student administrator, and more experienced teacher, drawing on my own deep commitment to feminist research principles of empowerment, representation, and reciprocity (Kirsch, “Creating Visions of

Reality”; Kirsch, “Friendship, Friendliness, and Feminist Fieldwork”; Nickoson and

Sheridan; Selfe and Hawisher; Harding; Smith, “Sociology from Women’s Experience” and Institutional Ethnography; Newkirk, “Seduction and Betrayal”). In all interactions, I aimed to be generous and open, creating welcome environments for talking and learning, not leading with judgment, and preferring encouragement over evaluation. In addition, I gave participants adequate time to review and excise any of their responses, in part or in whole, at the transcription stage and in the final write-up of all chapters. In return for these commitments of time and energy, I have also offered (and continue to offer) my

time and energy in ways that are meaningful and needed for individual participants. Thus far, my acts of reciprocity have included informal mentoring in teaching, administration, and other professional activities (e.g., conference networking); feedback on application materials and articles for publication; and (in progress) reciprocal mentoring on co- authoring for publication.

As I continue with my longitudinal narrative inquiry, I will work toward two related goals. The first will be to extend the qualitative/feminist research focus on representation to include and transcend any right of refusal to include information or edit my representations. Because I value what Newkirk calls participants’ rights to co- interpretation (“Seduction and Betrayal” 13-14), I have continued to meet with participants to discuss their responses to and interpretations of my analysis, guided by

Clandinin and Connelly’s questions in Narrative Inquiry:

When narrative inquirers return to participants with text, their question is

not so much, Have I got it right? Is this what you said? Is this what you

do? Rather, it is something much more global and human: Is this you? Do

you see yourself here? Is this the character you want to be when this is

read by others? These are more questions of identity than they are

questions of whether or not one has correctly reported what a participant

has said or done. (148)

While this process is often rendered invisible in academic publication (see Kirsch,

Women Writing the Academy), making participant responses and interpretations visible and valuable will be a vital goal of my work moving forward. 29 In addition, my second

29 As mentioned in Chapter One, these continued interviews with participants are not rendered visible in this dissertation due to time constraints. 65

goal will be to elicit additional stories of teaching and learning over time to trace the longitudinal development to which Yancey’s 2002 question about “TA development more generally” (64) directs our attention. If we are to understand new teacher development, then we must study individuals beyond their first semester or year of training, as they move from institution to institution as part of academic practice—rather than focus our disciplinary attention only on longitudinal program research.

Methods of Analysis

Methodologically, I illuminated and complicated newcomer identity learning through both thematic and structural analysis of stories, triangulating via multiple kinds of analysis as well as multiple kinds of data (e.g., stories, artifacts) and relying on

Riessman’s Narrative Methods in the Human Sciences as a central touchstone. According to Riessman, thematic narrative analysis pays attention to what is said (told) rather than how or to whom (telling), often with minimal attention to audience or contexts for the telling (see Chapter Three, 53-76). Thematic narrative analysis is similar to qualitative methods of grounded theory, interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), and other approaches in oral history and folklore (Riessman 74). However, Riessman is careful to point out that thematic narrative analysis differs from grounded theory in that prior theory definitely informs the initial analysis and first rounds of coding; that thematic narrative analysis preserves sequences and stories, with less “fracturing” of data/units of analysis; that narrative analysis at least minimally attends to the time and place of narration; and that narrative analysis is case-centered, without as much concern to stabilize concepts to theorize across cases (74-75). While Riessman suggests that thematic analysis can easily be confused with grounded theory, she differentiates the two based on the unit of analysis

(keeping stories intact) and the ends of analysis (a case-centered commitment, though the case can be an individual or, as in my project, a group).

While each of my chapters, in part, relies on the more common thematic analysis to illuminate what is being told, I also use structural analysis, which looks at how participants tell stories (see Riessman Chapter Four, 77-104). Riessman maintains that, while structural analysis is taken up to do work in narratology, linguistics, sociolinguistics, genre studies, and education, it is less often used in qualitative research

(78-81). She suggests that structural analysis begins with Labovian narrative structure in six parts (as in Addison’s chapter on narrative inquiry), looking at how stories are organized and sequenced by looking at the function of clauses (Riessman 81-100).

Further, Riessman argues that, in its differences from thematic analysis, structural analysis fulfills a needed function: while common themes may be present across cases and stories, structural analysis is one way to include and transcend similar patterns and show differences in meaning regarding similar events or seemingly singular points made

(e.g., “reasons why”) (Riessman 89-90). In other words, structural analysis is one way to examine “variations in meanings for individuals,” looking at stories not as “objective event[s]” but as “phenomenologically different experience[s]” (Riessman 90). For instance, in Chapter Four, structural analysis is one way to understand and describe

Penny’s stories of experiencing moments of trouble in face-to-face classroom discussion.

Beneath Riessman’s working definitions of both thematic and structural analysis are implicit arguments surrounding the benefits of case study, which is beyond my scope here and has already been advocated by narrative inquirers (Clandinin and Connelly;

Schaafsma and Vinz; Clandinin) and qualitative researchers alike (Dyson and Genishi;

Barone; Newkirk, “The Narrative Roots of the Case Study”; Bissex). In Engaging in

Narrative Inquiry, Clandinin asserts that the function of narrative inquiry is not to look for patterns across cases but to look at individual lives lived over time in relation to others in all their “particularity and incompleteness,” working toward “wondering about and imagining alternative possibilities” with less analytic time spent on aiming for

“generalizations and certainties” (52). However, in each of my chapters, I practice narrative inquiry as a both/and approach, deploying both thematic and structural analysis, looking for patterns and at individual experiences. As a feminist, I participate in this both/and approach, not looking only for “generalizations and certainties” because I believe that “particularity and incompleteness” come in the forms of individuals as well as groups. While I believe in the power of an “n = 1” (as do many of my participants, who have memorable experiences with transformative teachers of their own), the “case” I am studying throughout my project is this particular group of five newcomers who, in part, represent the gloriously untamed diversity of any group of individuals within a single writing program at any given time. Thus, in my chapters, I seek to put patterns and individual stories into conversation with each other.

In doing so, I do not suggest that any of the narrative patterns in my study are verifiably statistically significant or that a single case is somehow not enough. Instead, using multiple methods of narrative analysis as a triangulation tool, I have been able to destabilize some of the assumptions about those methods—and to bump up against and make visible the benefits and limitations of both approaches: reading for patterns across cases and close readings of individual cases. For instance, in Chapter Four, I used multiple coding methods to conduct structural analysis across cases/participants in order

to further select one participant and one story to analyze in depth; in Penny’s case, the patterns across all participants’ stories from my full corpus were telling in relation to her own individual story of teaching “troubles.” Additionally, in Chapter Five, while a structural analysis of linguistic markers of identity did not yield any particularly telling patterns within individual cases, a single pattern across cases guided me to select a certain group of stories to analyze thematically because they contained a large number of codes, which suggested that a certain line of questioning about teacher artifacts/documents might be a robust means of studying preferred future identities.

Ultimately, using thematic and structural analysis—a both/and, rather than an either/or— has led me to question the seemingly static function of either method in addition to illustrating that the relationship between the two is not, and does not have to be, sedimented or sequential. Further, using both thematic and structural analysis (in addition to the artifact analysis in Chapter Five) has foregrounded for me at every turn that, as

Schaafsma, Vinz, Brock, Dickson, and Sousanis remind us in the epigraph to this chapter,

“The ways of paying attention to (encountering or interpreting) narrative are infinite. But, the ways of paying attention determine what you are able to see” (78, emphasis in original). Listening deeply and rhetorically to newcomers’ stories of teaching and learning using interdisciplinary theories and understandings of learning and identity has theoretical and methodological implications for (re)theorizing how we study any identity learning, especially but not limited to newcomers and certainly not just for teachers

(which I return to in Chapter Six).

Five Participants, Ten Stories

To begin to introduce participants, I offer here two stories from each of them

(among the 40-60 stories that each participant shared during the first year of this study) rather than the more traditional ethnographic thick description of their demographics and brief biography, or the more traditional disciplinary locating devices of their sub-field

(literature, creative writing, rhetoric and composition), writing stances, or relevant teaching struggles. I do this as a feminist to create space within this document and genre for participants to speak (even as I am aware that their words here are already mediated by my research, my questions, my presence, and my selection); and I do this also as a narrative researcher to let participants stories breathe (see Frank) and to not encapsulate these five newcomers in my own words or in any one single story told in their own words. Within the following three chapters, I share a profile of each participant before

“diving in” to the depths of their individual case and story/ies. But here—rather than tell you about the fascinating relationship that Simone has created between assessment and encouragement, about Nigel’s aversion to checklists as a means of simplifying what should not be simplified, about Penny feeling like a bystander during her first year of teaching, or about how James and Violet also struggled with sexist talk and thinking in the writing classroom, too—I share two of the stories each of my participants shared with me. These stories are by no means representative of any whole because there is no

“whole” individual, story to tell, or static corpus. Instead, they are two stories that I have selected in part due to space constraints and in part because they offer brief snapshots: of participants’ remembered and recounted histories of learning; of some possible origins of the scripts for teaching and learning that currently motivate them as teachers; and of

moments in which they articulate some aspect of identity learning (whether that learning is currently being lived, told, or retold within or beyond the writing classroom).

Nigel

Digital media in schools A learning class along the way

I took a typing class in middle school, where I came into [four-year undergraduate] college you had to get your words per minute up. through a composition program, having read And that was mind-blowing for many of my Pedagogy of the Oppressed like, “yeah, that’s family members—not as in “I can’t believe what I want to do.” And having never they’re teaching you that kind of stuff,” but as engaged with: how do people actually learn? in “oh yeah—if you don’t know computers, the world is going to not work for you.” So I took a psychology class in my undergrad: Psychology of Learning. And I’m like: “I’m And I was also sort of promised in middle finally going to learn how people learn.” school, “If you know computers, there’s a lot [laughs] Yeah, it was mostly rats and pigeons. of people who don’t, so jobs are just going to [laughs] I can tell you all about behavorialism. fall at your feet because they need the young I can tell you all about B. F. Skinner and rats kids to get on and work these machines.” And and how addictions are formed. I can tell you I thought, “well, that’s all well and good.” But all about superstitious thinking and pigeons, I was doing my typing test on an early which was fascinating. But it doesn’t quite Macintosh [laughs], and now we’re doing PC. apply.

Then in high school, too, it was all really To an extent, I think it did help. I mean, my work-centered when I think about it now. We mother was like very strict. She doesn’t know never used Excel for creative or artistic she’s a behaviorialist psychologist. [laughs] purposes. It was very much “Complete the But she really buys into this idea of people as module. Next.” [laughs] “You’ve now been like very mechanized. So like she’d hit me or deemed—here’s your certificate of whatever. pinch me as I was learning to read if I was You are now proficient. You’ve exceeded wrong. You know, “he associates wrongness proficiency standards.” with hurt.” [laughs] Which isn’t good teaching either, now that I think about it. But I had to do that with never any conversation. that was her process, and to an extent I have Looking back—I didn’t even think about to say, “okay, well, at least she had a method. this—but looking back on it, there was never And it was informed by a theory of the world. any conversation of the affordances: “Here’s And that’s cool.” why this might work.” It was more: “if someone comes at you and they say, ‘I want I think like the psychology of learning helped to build this thing,’ and they have a list of to an extent; but it also it can be so totalizing. menu items they want you to do [laughs], For whatever reason—I couldn’t tell you you’re proficient in those things, so you can why—I resist those totalizing things, or I get that job.” resist having these just deployable “here, this is how this peg fits here” in life. So it helped It was very much becoming proficient with to an extent, and it gave me some language to the tool. I think their expectation was the talk about learning. tool’s never going to change. But it has.

Simone

A good teacher A teaching story to share

My mind automatically jumps to my high I remember in the summer orientation, school English teacher, when I was a senior. someone who had taught before Her name was UB, and it was for an AP recommended doing this: taking a day around English literature class. I, up until that point, Halloween and rather than have like a really had always been good at writing, and I loved structured class—I figured it was the middle reading. But I thought I hated English, and I of the semester—so I brought in candy for my thought I was going to go to med school or students, had them get in their circle like they study math or science, which is really funny. always did, and I said, “Instead of talking about English and your next assignment, But I took her class then, and over the we’re going to take today to just talk about summer, we had a ton of different assigned college and how it’s going for you. You readings and some writing to do for the first know, what’s surprising? What are you day. And naturally, I was up late the night enjoying? What are you liking? What are you before the first day of school trying to do it worried about? What advice do you have for all. And in the past, I’d always been able to others in the classroom?” get away with As and good grades doing that. And then got to class the first day, turned that And at first it was a little hard to get them in, and the following day we all got our going, but then they were really talkative and grades back. And I think every single person opened up. And several of them said, “I am so had like a C or a D on it. And she’s like: glad you did this for us because this is useful. “These don’t count, but this is what your Not just because we didn’t have to sit and papers would get,” which was startling and write and do a normal class, but because we kind of daunting. actually talked to lots of other people in the class and they had good ideas to offer up.” But to jump ahead—that wound up being the most informative and shaping English class I recommend taking a day to do that about I’ve had because she didn’t just write a letter mid semester. And then your students will grade on the top. She gave us almost as much know too that you do care about them, and writing in feedback as we had provided on the you can sort of use that opportunity to offer paper and made sure to point out the really them your advice on college. good things, which was really helpful. And I don’t think I ever received that much You can also become aware of what they’re substantial feedback. And she devoted just as dealing with. So for instance I learned several much time to the good, too. And for me, it of them were from out of town and were also made me really want to work harder and really struggling at this point with being so far get As in the class, because I was a letter away from their families because they had grade driven student. But that was kind of an been here long enough now that it was kind of eye opening experience as an English student sinking in that they can’t just go home all the in high school. time. And I also worked with a ton of UPS [students]. So I just learned a lot of things like But it’s not necessarily a story, but things I that about my students, which I think was remember about being in class with her. really useful, too.

Penny

A good teacher Teacher stories told by friends

The first thing that came to mind was this So I started thinking about what friends teacher I had in fifth grade, whose name is growing up would say about teachers. I Ms. D. I went to Catholic school my whole realized that a lot of it was negative, like: “oh life, and she taught language arts. And she she has no idea what she’s talking about,” or taught it like a creative writing class, which “this teacher’s such a bitch.” And I think at I’d never done anything like that before. And some point it becomes not cool to like your she was the first teacher who said to me, teacher when you’re growing up. I don’t “your writing is really good. You’re doing know if that’s middle school or whatever—I really good things in your writing.” And she don’t know. But at some point it’s way cooler had such an impact on me that I still to hate on your teacher than to like them. remember and think about when I’m thinking about like good teachers I’ve had in my life. And so I was thinking about all these bad teachers I’d had and hearing friends talk about She was like in her twenties, and she had just how horrible that teacher was: “they didn’t gotten out of school. And she just took our know what they were talking about,” or “they ideas seriously, like she believed the stuff we didn’t know the subject.” Or all these value said when we were fifth graders, which was judgments on whether they deserved to be really cool. I remember her talking to me teaching the class, which is scary. though like face to face about my writing, which also might have been the first time that And the thing with Ms. D—a lot of people had happened, where a teacher actually sat hated her and were so glad when she left the down with me and said, “Here is what I see school. And it was me and my friend group of you doing.” And it was also written 5 or 6 other people who loved her and would comments—but I have a very clear memory go and hang out with her during recess, and of sitting at her desk with her and her talking couldn’t get enough of spending time with her to me about my writing. and learning from her. And all these other people who were like: “she’s crazy.” Crazy I I think her primary focus was giving us what think is a word often used to talk about we needed, which—coming out of a Catholic teachers who people don’t like. I do think elementary school—was not something that I there’s some kind of overlap there, and I don’t think was acceptable. And she was let go the know what that is. And I think I worry about next year. [laughs] So I think her focus was: that as a teacher now. I worry so much about “I want to get to know my students as people my students thinking I’m not doing a good and see what they need from me and try to enough job. And part of that is just my own give them that.” And she had a curriculum to insecurity; but I think part of it is that that’s follow, too; but I think she was like: “yeah, the discourse we develop about teachers a lot. we’ll get to that stuff. But it’s more important It’s not cool to sit around and say, “oh my that I understand who my students are and gosh, this teacher is just so great. She’s so what their needs are and then I adapt in order smart.” to fit that.”

Violet

A recent teacher story overheard Teaching story to share

This just happened recently. I was sitting So I do a lesson on rape culture, or a around the table on Friday, and some family discussion where [students] have a bunch of friends of ours come over, and we were readings they have to do and then we discuss eating. And the kids were sitting around the it. And the conversation is often disappointing table, and they started talking about their and very focused on “why is everybody being teachers. And they were talking about mostly so mean to the men,” “most men aren’t the ones that they had problems with, a little rapists,” which is true, and “rape culture’s not bit the ones they liked, but [mostly] the ones even a thing, nobody thinks it’s okay, we that they thought were boring or mean or don’t teach anybody it’s okay.” I’m like: whatever. “Actually, that’s my point.”

And I was like: “this is a rite of passage for And it’s an incredibly testing discussion every me. Because I’m sitting and I’m listening to semester, and there’s always some people that these kids, these students, talking about their I feel already know what I’m trying to get teachers, thinking, ‘well, you probably were across in this discussion and other people—I getting on her nerves.’” [laughs] And I was don’t know that I really change anybody’s just identifying so with the teachers. mind about anything in that discussion. But I kind of hope that I am changing some people, And I’m thinking: “I know that I’ve talked at least in having them be informed. bad about some teachers. That probably I was wrong.” But I was a good student, and I But the thing that’s so hard about the didn’t complain. conversation is that, while I will interject in places where people are saying things that are They said some sentence that a teacher had factually false, I tend to just let the said that was kind of abrasive about them, conversation go a little bit and let them and I was like: “you have pushed that woman respond to each other. And then I’ll just kind to her edge, and you need to start acting of step back. Because I’ve done a lot of right.” I did [say that]. And the oldest one is research on this issue. I can shut the not even 13; but I was like: “you guys, conversation down if I wanted to. I could say, teaching is really hard. You don’t realize how “no, and here’s why.” But because I’m so hard it is. [laughs] Well, you just don’t committed to letting them discover things, I understand because you only see it from your kind of try to step back and let people be perspective. And you don’t understand that where they are and know that I can’t take their budget got cut again, that none of their everybody from A to Z all at once. Sometimes students pay attention, and they work really just A to B is good, or acknowledgement of B hard and feel like they’re wasting their life. is good. [laughs] You don’t know what’s going on that day. I would share that story to say, “this is a Like: ‘well, maybe you make it easy on that difficult thing that comes up in my teaching teacher.’” all the time. But you can’t always take people from A to Z. You don’t learn that way, and other people don’t learn that way either.”

James

Digital media story to share Good teacher’s teaching philosophy

I’d probably tell, share the story about my 101 Well, it seems to me on the student end—she course and trying to do a blogging just seemed very good— assignment. I would say, if you haven’t planned that out before the semester has And I think that I would be really interested, started, it’s probably a bad idea. I just think even though I don’t think there’s any reason I even if—I’m relatively technologically would see her—to see K teaching an literate, and it was difficult to set up a blog, undergrad course because I’m sure it’s very figure out how students were going to get on different. But with a graduate course, it’s it. If it’s Day 1 of the semester, “send me your completely dependent on students who have gmail accounts, you’re all on this blog now, done the reading and are invested in the here’s how you get on it,” I’d say that every material. But sort of with that as given, she is other day of class, that’s doable. But if it’s extremely good at formulating questions, “okay, so we’re shifting gears. Now Unit 4, which if you were to take a surface level— you’re bloggin’”— I feel like if a theoretical mathematician It was just so bad. I mean it wasn’t so bad. would come into K’s class, they might say all But the students and myself were very she does is ask questions. You know, there confused when I tried to do that in 101, which doesn’t seem to be teaching happening. honestly was a preparation thing for me. But it There’s no writing on the board, things like was my first time teaching, and I was just that. But the questions she asks are so trying to stay afloat, I think, too. So for first extremely pedagogical, and not in the leading time teachers, my advice would be: “just try way. They’re almost always honest questions. to make it work if you have to do it, or if you’re being asked to do it. It’s going to be And the other thing that I like is that she’s not difficult, and it probably won’t go the way afraid to say when people are seemingly you want it to. But you learn stuff from—” wrong, but also to converse about that or ask I learned a lot from that blog thing, too. what other people think about this. So it seems like a very dialogic type teaching But then for like teachers who have taught philosophy. before, if an imagined teacher had been teaching for a while but was deciding whether It’s more just formulating the appropriate or not they wanted to incorporate technology, questions that can foster a class discussion, I would be like: “okay, so what’s your and I think that she has said that occasionally argument? Why would you want to it oscillates between her having an agenda incorporate technology?” And if it was just based on the readings and just actual curiosity sort of “I feel like I have to,” or “the field is about what people think about X. (And X is telling me that I’m an asshole because I’m not always disciplinary questions for K, which are doing blogs or whatever,” I’d be like: “well, interesting to me, too.) that’s not a good reason.”

A Research Story

In “Narrative Inquiry as Practice: Tensions and Possibilities,” Downey and

Clandinin argue, “In narrative inquiry, we try to understand the stories under or on the edges of stories lived and told, as no story stands on its own but rather in relation to any others—including the stories of the narrative inquirer” (qtd. in Clandinin 82). Just as participants’ stories above, and in the following chapters, do not stand alone, neither do my own stories. All narrative inquirers (and, I would argue, all researchers) “are in the phenomenon under study” (Clandinin 81), “in the midst…of storied landscapes we are studying” (Clandinin 82). Because I concur with Jean Clandinin that “narrative inquirers must begin, then, with inquiring into our own stories of experience” (82), I close this chapter by sharing one version of my own research story right now.

I came into a doctoral program with five years of high school English teaching experience. In those five years in a public school district in central Florida, I participated in a lot of professional development, primarily for writing instruction and for teaching English language learners. Some of that professional development was good; and much of it was not.

When I left teaching to pursue a PhD, I brought those experiences with me in the form of a question: Does professional development even work? To which I assumed I already knew the answer: It depends.

It depends on who’s present, who’s open, who’s motivated, what’s clear, who the teachers are, who the facilitators are, who the students are, and so on. It depends on a lot that I wasn’t sure I wanted to—or could—trace.

During my PhD program, I participated in my third version of new teacher professional development in our field: the practicum. During the week of Halloween, we began class by going around the room and individually sharing “Scary Things” we were concerned about as teachers. More than half of the graduate students in the course were first-time teachers who had a slew of concerns ranging from medical emergencies to student defiance. None of which made my own list of “Scary Things,” because I had already experienced so many of them.

That night, I made a list of “Things I don’t have to be afraid of happening for the first time,” which I still have saved in my phone. (The list is a combination of my peers’ concerns and my memories of my early teaching experiences. For instance, having a student nap on the floor and school-wide lockdowns for escaped prisoners were two specific high school teaching experiences of mine.)

I didn’t make the list because I wanted evidence of my experience or expertise, or others’ inexperience or fears. I made it because I realized I had already forgotten so many earlier teaching fears and concerns.

I made it because I didn’t realize how much I had already internalized until that open conversation with people teaching for the first time.

I made it because it took that conversation for me to begin to consider how much my previous experiences had led me to tell different kinds of stories about my own teaching abilities and identities.

Each of the items on this list had their own stories shared that day in a safe space for new teachers to reveal not just what they feared, but what was underneath those fears: what they thought they should be prepared for and how they thought they should act and be in relation to their students.

When it was finally time to choose a group of teachers to study for my dissertation, I elected to study individuals in the community I had recently entered, rather than the one I’d exited: new writing teachers in English who are typically new graduate students and new teachers who do not undergo the same kind of years-long systematic teacher training or subsequent professional development that K12 teachers do (which has benefits as well as limitations).

When it was time to choose a site at which to study, I elected to start with individuals within a single program and trace them over time, rather than look at any single professional development space-time. I didn’t want to put professional development at the center of teacher knowledge, or assume a singular response to any workshop, training, or orientation event.

And when it was time to choose how to go about studying new writing teachers, I elected to study stories as one way to understand how they were experiencing and

learning professional identities for the first time in ways I no longer had the same experiential access to.

As a mentor, I remind new teachers that they will never teach their first class twice. Even by the time they make it to their second section on the first day of class, they have already increased their teaching experience exponentially. This dissertation is one kind of evidence of my research corollary of that: it is an experience I cannot repeat through which I have sought to make visible the experiences and self-understandings of new teachers that none of us can repeat or remember in all of their situated complexities.

The following chapters share newcomers’ stories not to evaluate them through any paradigmatic narrative prisms of causality or coherence, or to privilege any specific means of enculturation for disciplinary continuity’s sake. Instead, my goal in conducting this research was to let newcomers’ stories “wash over, through, and around [me],” as

Ratcliffe suggests, and then let them not “lie there” but speak and breathe and be in order

“to inform [my own] politics and ethics,” my own understandings and standing-under

(28). And my goal in this dissertation document is to make visible the stories at work in newcomers’ understandings of themselves in order to do more than “note” what I have already normed in and through my own teaching stories and experiences.

CHAPTER THREE

NOT VERY DEAD POETS SOCIETY: NEW WRITING TEACHERS’ OWN

NARRATIVES OF SCHOOLING, LEARNING, AND TEACHING

“Something will happen in class that just didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and I’ll be like, ‘you know, I really have to get past this notion that every class is going to be one of these Dead Poets Society moments where we’re all just having a good time, we’re all inspired, you know, and having epiphanies,’ or whatever. I’ve never seen Dead Poets Society [laughs], but in my head that’s what it’s like. Everybody gathering around and having these grand moments in class.” –Violet

“I feel like my teaching statement comes across as ‘I’m going to be Paulo Freire’ because that’s what we get is this—people who have been teaching forever and ever, and we’re just supposed to kind of take up these radical student centered models. And I do think there’s a huge gap where we don’t talk about [new teachers], or don’t expect [new teachers] to be different from people who have been doing it for years.” –Penny

New writing teachers might enter graduate programs with visions of becoming

English teacher John Keating, portrayed by Robin Williams in the 1989 film Dead Poets

Society, which might be transmogrified into becoming Paulo Freire (or at least the kind of critical pedagogue he has inspired since the 1950s). While someone might contend that these two teacher figures are performed in vastly different contexts toward different audiences for different rhetorical purposes, I would join feminists who would assert instead that, unfortunately, the hero story remains largely unchanged even as the site and contexts shift radically. The teacher tropes that new writing teachers have already received and perceived as somehow preferred—whether marked, as in the above

quotations, as epiphanies, grand moments, or student-centered models—are often typically and problematically sanitized and decontextualized, presenting a codified version of transformation not in line with most new teachers’ everyday lived experiences.

What professional development gets John Keating to epiphany status? What happens when students aren’t inspired to stand on their desks? What support is required to enact

Freirian models for literacy education in contemporary institutions driven by public accountability but limited by economic austerity in vastly different conditions than Brazil in the 1950s? None of my participants knows or mentions. The stories they have heard are rife with unproductive positions and conflicting scripts for teachers’ professional identity learning and everyday practice in ways that participants are hard pressed to make sense of. More importantly, the stories they have heard are, quite frankly, less interesting than the stories they tell about good teachers from their pasts, unexpected events in their own classrooms, and their visions for their teacherly futures—all of which are rich with detail, replete with everyday moments of meaningful relationship-building and memorable means of knowledge-making, and often reflect and contribute to desired models (however implicit) for contemporary teaching and learning.

It is one of my chief understandings at the outset of this chapter that cultural scripts for acting and being are unavoidable givens; and scripts for teaching and learning in writing studies are no exception. In Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding: An

Inquiry into Human Knowledge Structures, Schank and Abelson define “script” as “a structure that describes appropriate sequences of events in a particular context,” that has certain roles (41), and that is written from a specific point of view (42). Regardless of our attempts to remain open to myriad ways of being an academic professional in our field

(see Anderson and Romano; Bailif, Davis, and Mountford; Goodburn, Lecourt, and

Leverenz), our disciplinary scripts about new writing teachers are typically written from the point of view of WPAs for WPAs who “train” new writing teachers across the country. These scripts typically focus on program coherence and eliciting composition instructors to perform certain practices, adhere to specific assignment sequences, and align their thinking about writing with their program’s espoused epistemologies and paradigms (e.g., Powell et al.; Guerra and Bawarshi; Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”). In

“Too Cool for School?” Christine Farris notes that even a sample/model syllabus assumes an ideal type of teacher who can perform it “perfectly” (101). This desire for coherence and alignment—for an ideal type of teacher—might seem (not inarguably) sensible and needed from an institutional perspective. Yet it rests on assumptions of coherence as possible and desirable within a single program, and it narrows our focus to the pinpoint of moments in which this coherence is somehow achieved (or not)—rather than turning our attention and inquiry to a longer-term view of teacher development that would benefit individual teachers and also the programs, departments, and institutions that house them as well as our field.

In “The Professionalization of TA Development Programs: A Heuristic for

Curriculum Design,” Kathleen Yancey asks, “What other kinds of needs would we identify for TA development if our central concern were not local exigence but TA development more generally?” (64). Her question still begs an answer, nearly 15 years later, when we remain trapped in the tensions between focusing on individual teachers (as in Heather Camp’s single case study of a secondary English teacher enrolled in a composition theory course in “Exploring Identity-based Challenges to English Teachers’

Professional Growth”) and desiring national writing program standards and practices (as

Reid suggests in her opening of “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing,” with a purpose to

“ask more broadly whether writing pedagogy educators can usefully strive to agree not just on core goals for teacher preparation but on curricula that will move us toward those goals” [W199]). Generally, new teacher research focuses on the program as a meso unit of analysis and action (both aptly so and with its own set of hindrances), or on the relationships between individual writing teachers and the programs that enculturate and support them. In the latter case, as in Yancey’s heuristic, identity is situated as a central concept in new teacher development, with what Yancey asserts are ethical implications embedded in any model of teacher support: “What kinds of teacher have we imagined and do we construct in our materials and discussions? one with her own agency or one who is limited to enact a priori institutional prerogatives?” (72).

I support Yancey’s queries but remain troubled by one of her claims—because it is the one that I initially wanted to be the most true at the outset of my study: that a “good program” is “a model of TA development that welcomes and socializes the TA without scripting him or her” (65, emphasis mine). I wanted to advocate for such a program model, but have thankfully had my views on professional development, teaching, and research influenced by perspectives on feminist ontologies and administrative praxis.

Becoming a teacher is not a matter of having agency or being limited within institutional contexts; it is a both/and—and then some. If scripts are structures within which our actions are recognized as appropriate within a given context, then we are always already scripted, multiply so, and our program structures for new teacher preparation cannot avoid scripting us any more than the structures of education, family life, and pop culture

can. This is both constraining and enabling, allowing us to be recognized as agents in social worlds and restricting us in relation to certain actions marked as available or preferred. Without any sort of structuring of roles, how would new writing teachers learn how to be and become teachers at the college level? Individually, without knowing who has written the script and its constructed (not concomitant) roles, how would new teachers learn how to interrogate its situated point of view and understand themselves in relation to it? And just as importantly, for our disciplinary purposes (both research and administrative), how might we elicit and examine the myriad scripts that new teachers remember, receive, and enact before, during, and long after their authorized “training”?

New teachers’ identities are both constraining and enabling. So are our cultural scripts about teaching and the long-standing disciplinary, public, and popular narratives that constitute and operationalize them. As a field, then, rather than attempt to script newcomers in ever-narrowing prescriptive ways—or not script them at all—we should be more careful in how we script new writing teachers (in what we address, what we omit, and how we “train”). In order to be more careful in how we script new teachers within our programs, we should be more aware of how they are already scripted—and how they are working through their own identity learning along a trajectory long in progress, in relation to multiple scripts.

If we are going to become even more thoughtful in how we reveal and articulate new teacher identities in relation to cultural scripts, then we have two challenges. One is to interrupt our own scholarly narratives that take a limited few stances toward new teacher identities (as briefly described in Chapter One and presented in depth in the next section). The second is to continually refresh our ways of studying identities—which I

take up in this chapter as one way that we might learn to tell a different kind of story about new teachers, one we have thus far elided more than highlighted. In writing studies, scholars typically study new teacher identities by looking at individuals’ understandings of themselves as academic writers (Farris, Subject to Change; Barr Ebest, Changing the

Way We Teach; Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”; Reid, “Teaching Writing Teachers

Writing”) and in the dual role of student and teacher (Dobrin; Restaino; Brown;

Grouling). In education, scholars typically study broader swaths of educational experience, digging into what Ritchie and Wilson call the “accidental apprenticeship” of learning to be a teacher by being a K12 student for most of our lives (e.g., Clandinin and

Connelly, “Stories to Live by,” and Connelly and Clandinin, “Narrative Understandings,” both with articulated distinctions held between in school and out of school). Both of these approaches are sensible given disciplinary areas of inquiry and expertise as well as the institutional and administrative pressures put upon our research and teaching and the disciplinary and institutional expectations of newcomer enculturation. Yet for each discipline’s valuable approach to studying teacher identities, both of these stances toward new teacher research are also limiting in three troubling ways. First, they look predominantly at an object of importance to a single discipline rather than beginning with a more complex approach toward teachers as human beings whose self-understandings exceed the bounds of any one domain, discipline, or subject. Looking at particular roles of Writer or Student elides not only other roles but also other domains outside of teaching or performing academic writing. Second, both also tend to situate identities and prior experiences as limiting rather than constraining and enabling. For example, a new writing teacher’s prior knowledge of and feelings about writing are portrayed as narrow or

restrictive (Farris, Subject to Change; Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach; Dryer,

“At a Mirror Darkly”), or a preservice teacher’s idealization of an authoritarian teacher as problematic (Ritchie and Wilson 40). Last, by rendering present identities and practices as often hindered by past experiences, each of these approaches takes a stance toward new teacher research that foregrounds the past and too often occludes possible futures and newcomers’ desired trajectories for their teaching lives and identities.

Based on my research thus far, I see three primary scripts functioning in and around new writing teachers in our field:

(1) The first is a set of disciplinary narratives about new writing teachers, which

often focus on academic writing, on program structures for teacher training,

and on present practice or short-term deliverables. Of the many issues I have

with these narratives (as detailed in Chapter One), two salient issues here are

that they focus on teaching first-year writing as an unmarked norm and that

newcomers to our field are generally unaware of them.

(2) The second is a set of public and pop culture narratives that new teachers have

heard, received, and remember. Typically, these narratives have K12 teachers

as their often unmarked norm in ways that do not map neatly onto teaching

college writing.

(3) The third is a set of narratives in progress that emerge from new teachers’ own

experiences as students, as writing teachers, as learners, and as people.

Newcomers might be unaware of our disciplinary narratives,30 but they have experienced and remember public and popular narratives and are currently engaged in their own teaching experiences as complex human beings. If we want to understand new teacher identity learning and development, we need better ways of studying and making visible new teachers’ developing scripts in relation to these other scripts. And we need to do so without falling back into two narrative grooves that perpetuate unproductive assumptions about newcomers. The first is that new teachers are too often assumed not to have their own experiences to theorize from because they haven’t taught before (Rodrigue; Barr

Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach; Powell et al.; Ritchie and Wilson; Rankin) despite that participants in my study have relevant, impactful learning experiences that do offer generative models for teaching and learning, whether they come from past experiences across domains or even a single semester’s worth of teaching. Before someone enters the classroom as a teacher of record, perhaps she has no official “teaching experience”; but that moment is so quickly dashed, replaced with a slew of embodied experiences from which to theorize (if given time and support). The second narrative groove is that new writing teachers need to have their previous experiences with schooling supplanted by

“our” disciplinary and program paradigms—which describes the conversion model that

Welch denounced in the 1990s, that Farris traced during the same period, that Yancey’s statement seems to infer was still occurring a decade later, and that I would argue is still happening in institutions right now.

30 Many of these narratives are not particularly replete with success stories or multiple models for new teacher agency. As Anderson and Romano note in Culture Shock and the Practice of Profession, a great deal of composition lore is replete with “angry tales of oppression and disappointment” (4). So I do not take this “not-knowing” as a hindrance. 87

As a feminist researcher, teacher, and once-and-future administrator, I hope to avoid these assumptions—that newcomers have little relevant experience, or that we should convert newcomers to “our” practices, which are “best,” even at the expense of villainizing or replacing too many of their own previous educational and literacy experiences. Instead, I want to build a corner of a different puzzle—where learning, identity, and scripts collide without foregrounding assumptions of newcomer deficit or inferiority—by tracing newcomers’ teaching identities temporally, as narrated via stories of their own experiences over time. Unfortunately, my project could not equally foreground all aspects of identity for participants, who shared stories with me while speaking from multiple positions: as poet or community activist, as musician or expectant mother, as graduate students and teachers comfortable “winging it” or worried of being

“found out” and exposed as imposters. Instead, my interview questions primarily (though not exclusively) elicited teaching stories from over the course of their lifetimes— including teacher experiences and stories from their pasts, current memorable moments from their graduate program, and projective identities (see Gee Chapter 7) for possible and preferred teaching futures. In other words, rather than aim to trace all aspects of participants’ identities—and therefore trace none of them well—I attempted to answer another of Yancey’s questions: “what experiences and education have shaped the TA’s construct of a teacher, and how does he or she construct his or her relationship to that identity?” (72). My interview questions illuminated the former part of her question, the

“what”; and my methodology implicitly already answered the latter, the “how,” via story, specifically stories of the past with some glimpses into possible futures.

In this chapter, then, I examine participants’ stories of teaching and learning from my full interview corpus to illustrate the construction of remembered pasts and anticipated futures for these five teachers new to our field right now. Just as important as the remembered pasts and anticipated futures are the relationships between them in a person’s life over time. In this chapter, I ask: In what ways have new teacher identities already been learned over time? How are newcomers’ self-understandings storied by narrative(s) as cultural tool(s) for scripting newcomers (and old-timers alike) into certain ways of being in school? And how might narrative as a methodology illuminate complex pasts and possible futures that new teachers desire to enact and work toward, which are otherwise elided or flattened in some writing program research?

To answer these questions, I rely on Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s characterization of lamination, which I first describe in relation to its needed applicability in new teacher research in English. Next, I describe my specific methods for coding and analysis of laminated identities in my five participants’ stories of teaching and learning. I then offer my results in three parts: (1) an overview of the teaching roles present throughout participants’ stories; (2) an analysis of the flattened roles present in others’ stories about teachers, told to participants, via family, friends, or media—and specifically marked by participants as dispreferred; and finally (3) an in-depth case study of Nigel, a first-year teacher, via stories of his own past, current teaching, and desired future. Using narrative research as a feminist, interdisciplinary methodology, I reveal important disparities between the stories told about teachers, particularly those who are new, and new teachers’ own retold experiences with and desires for teaching writing. Talking with new writing teachers about their histories of schooling, learning, and teaching reveals different

stories than the cultural tropes about teachers in public, popular, or even scholarly narratives.31 In this chapter, I argue that, despite scholarly representations of new teachers as having no experience to theorize from (or no time or way to theorize from the minimal experience they do have) and of new teacher identities and desires as hindrances, the five new teachers in my study have already learned complex laminated identities and have reflected on and enacted more generative scripts for contemporary teaching and—more importantly—learning, than new teachers are often depicted as knowing or having developed.

In this chapter, then, I illuminate how newcomers’ identities are learned and storied over time in ways that exceed scholarly and public/popular scripts about new teachers; and I do so by actively participating in reading and sharing stories from newcomers about their complex pasts and possible futures. This chapter examines participants’ educational histories along complex trajectories of being, as revealed in and shaped by stories of the past, present, and future. In doing so, it also traces new teachers’ identities as they are learned across domains and in relation to shifting professional identities and multiple, dynamic social roles. Looking at participants’ histories and identity learning, this chapter also illuminates new teachers’ implicit scripts for teaching and, more importantly, for learning that are often elided or flattened in new teacher scholarship that reinforces (however unconsciously) transmission or conversion models of learning. The purpose of this chapter is not to dictate prescriptive practices for new teacher preparation on the local level, as Yancey suggests we have so often focused on as

31 Especially, for instance, in our “manuals” for learning to teach writing (see Hedengren; Lockhart and Roberge). 90

a field, or to suggest that there is one singular method for new teacher researchers interested in identity learning. Instead, my purpose is twofold. First, to show why, as a field, we need more nuanced understandings of new writing teachers as adults with complex identities that precede and exceed commonplace disciplinary narratives of graduate student teachers in dual roles (Restaino; Grouling) as students needing to be trained or converted (Welch; Farris, Subject to Change) and as teachers resisting or capitulating to authorized structures of support (Hesse; Maxfield). And second, to enact narrative as one generative means of how we might explore and make visible the multilayered identities and productive scripts for teaching and learning that newcomers have already been developing (however tacitly) as reflective learners throughout their lives.

Using Lamination to Re-Story Scholarly Narratives about New Teachers

Though new writing teachers may be unfamiliar with scholarly narratives about new teachers (in education and in writing studies), the stories we tell about newcomers in scholarship still hold sway for those who teach, research, and support new writing teachers in our field. In this section, then, I offer a snapshot of two particularly troubling stories told about new teachers: the first is that new teachers are limited because they have no experience to theorize from, or no time or way to theorize from the minimal experience they do have; and the second is that new teachers’ previous identities and experiences hinder their effectiveness as teachers. I do not contend that either of these stories in the resonant thread of identity in new teacher research is untrue or unfounded— but that these two stories undergird the history of inquiry into new writing teacher

education in English studies in often invisible ways. This is particularly unfortunate because such stories have power to proleptically call new teachers into positions of deficiency (however unintentionally) rife with embodied consequences—especially in relation to the more experienced teacher-scholars and administrators who teach and supervise them. Perhaps most importantly, their continued retelling in published research allows us as a field to elide other more generative stories that are equally true and could potentially work toward more agentive positions for newcomers and for us all.

I want to pause here to situate a deeper source of contention that I have with narratives of deficit and limitation in new teacher research: such narratives, however unintentionally, are laced with affective judgments about newcomers as a social group and the individual teachers who constitute that group. As members of a historically contentious field, we live daily in the tensions between our desire for an ethics of care and deep rhetorical listening (in WPA work, see kyburz, Jukuri, and Restaino) and deeply rooted educational and institutional histories that demand educators occupy problematic positions of evaluation inextricably tied not just to matriculation and commencement but also to social mobility and value-laden identity development under the auspices of education and professionalization (presented as transformative in advantageous ways).

Unfortunately, much well-intentioned, oft-cited scholarship (including work I admire and build on in this project) evaluates newcomers as teachers, as students, and as people, without articulating nuanced enough understandings of how the structures we contribute to are culturally responsible for engendering and authorizing certain dispositions

(whether of deficiency, resistance, powerlessness, or victimization). Even when, as researchers, we stake claims to study programs or structures of support, our attention can

shift—too easily and quite problematically—to chronicling individual new teachers’ negative dispositions. For example, for all its merits—and I see many, including the call for graduate faculty in English to change the way “we” teach—Barr Ebest’s write-up of her study includes value judgments about individual participants, clearly visible in her subheadings, which include “Daddy’s Girl,” “Antifeminist,” and “Mr. Negative” to describe three graduate student teachers, and “In Control,” “Out of Control,” and “Out of

Her Element” to label their relationships to teaching in ways that I am hard-pressed to find as helpful as the rest of her analysis. While I do not believe that new teacher researchers intend to put the onus of responsibility onto individual newcomers, many new teacher narratives project too much responsibility onto individual students (or kinds of students) without holding the system—and the structures that (re)produce resistance to change in education—accountable (see Bourdieu and Passeron). Perceiving and labeling new teachers as deficient or limited without explicitly interrogating multiple structural reasons for it—not only those that are tied to identity categories “outside” the university

(gender, race, class) but also those “in” it (student, teacher, worker)—too easily results in branding individuals as culprits and invites, rather than destabilizes, unproductive positions for newcomers.

One way to interrupt and re-story this scene is to learn to tell a different kind of story; in this section, I suggest that one way to do so is to explicitly study new teachers’ laminated identities as multimotivated and multimediated in and over time across

“multiple, complexly interanimating trajectories and domains of activity” (Prior and

Shipka 181). I build and expand on Prior and Shipka’s working definition of lamination by studying newcomers’ identities as laminated and learned, narrativized and storied over

time; I suggest that using narrative as a methodology to study identity learning is one way to reveal a fuller, more generous depiction of new teacher identities as both constraining and enabling, and show actual teacher learning and possibilities for future learning rather than only shining a light into the well-worn narrative grooves of deficit and difficulty.

Story #1: New teachers have little to no experience to theorize from, or no time or ability to theorize from what little experience they do have.

On the surface, that new teachers have minimal or no teaching experience seems like a statement of fact. Yet when this “fact” gets taken up into circulating scholarly narratives, it participates in ruling academic and workplace scripts that place precedence on experience and often conflate experience with expertise (which, again, can be both true and not always true). As such—as Ochs and Capps remind us that every narrative takes a moral stance (243)—a statement of “fact” becomes an evaluation that leads with an assumption of deficit rather than foregrounding a stance of possibility. This leads to two troubling patterns in new teacher scholarship. First, new teachers get lumped together, with more complex identities flattened under the label “inexperienced.” For instance, inexperienced writing teachers—regardless of age or levels of reflective experience in schools and in other workplaces—are labeled in published research as more likely to have reductive views of writing (see Rodrigue) and as resistant for multiple reasons (Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach 101-02). Second, in addition to reductive and resistant, inexperienced teachers are also labeled as lacking, either in practice or in theorizing from it. For instance, in “Negotiating Resistance and Change:

One Program’s Struggle Not to Convert,” those responsible for new teacher enculturation

and orientation at UofL in the late ‘90s write: “many of the teachers’ practical questions

[during summer practicum course] stem not from a resistance to theory but from a lack of practice on which to ground a particular theory” (Powell et al. 126, emphasis mine).

Meanwhile, in their study of pre-service teachers in English education programs, Ritchie and Wilson write: “The problem is that experience is often left untheorized” (15).

These narratives, which link inexperience with deficit (and presumably resulting resistance), began in the early twentieth century when literature faculty bemoaned undergraduate students’ need to be taught writing at all (Thomas) and continued in the

50s and 60s as English faculty took the teaching of writing as a given but also as a stepping stone to more privileged scholarly work in literature (Hunting; “Training”).

More recently, in scholarship from the 90s (Farris, Subject to Change; Rankin) to the

2010s (Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”; Grouling), composition scholars seem to have flipped the script without rewriting it, telling stories about literature and creative writing students as resistant to practices we now privilege in composition (Welch; Hesse; Powell et al.; Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach; Grouling) and as lacking in effective constructs for teaching. For instance, in “At a Mirror Darkly: The Imagined

Undergraduate Writers of Ten Novice Composition Instructors,” Dryer draws these conclusions about graduate student teachers in his study and program: “novice teachers’ shallow history of student-teacher interactions may not furnish them with viable alternatives to the immediately available precedent of their own experience” (433). The association between “novice” and “shallow” is, again, an evaluation that, while potentially accurate some of the time, is not particularly generative or helpful as a lens for viewing newcomers—or for being one.

Given these existing narratives of inexperience and lack—in addition to ruling scripts privileging mastery and expertise in the academy—it is perhaps not surprising that narratives of deficit are present not just in scholarship but also often in new teachers’ own perceptions, as reported by researchers conducting such studies. New teachers often mark themselves as inexperienced (see Belanger and Gruber; Skorczewski, “From Playing the

Role”; Comer) in ways that are deeply evaluative and rooted in fear (Skorczewski, “From

Playing the Role”) as well as frustration and insecurity regarding teaching because their stories—as they have learned to tell them and have reported them to particular researchers—do not take them far enough into ways “of contextualizing [their] frustrations [and] understanding them in the light of other stories that both corroborate and challenge [their] implicit pedagogical theories” (Rankin 66).

Story #2: New teachers bring in experiences and identities in progress that hinder their success and teaching effectiveness.

Despite often being situated as having little to minimal teaching experience, new writing teachers are also too frequently depicted in new teacher research as being limited by the educational experiences they do have and bring into the classroom as teachers.

Ritchie and Wilson explicitly mark that “teachers and pre-service teachers have limited and impoverished cultural resources from which to draw as they construct an identity for themselves” (35), whether these resources come from their own experiences in the classroom or conflicting narratives of teaching they pick up outside the classroom:

The confusing and contradictory narratives of teaching and literacy in our

culture often construct teachers’ identities and practices in ways that

subvert their real potential to develop as teachers, diminishing their

authority and undermining potentially powerful conceptions of teaching,

literacy, and selfhood. (19)

I am particularly troubled by the stacking of negative actions—subvert, diminish, undermine—as well as the descriptor of teachers’ “real” potential, as if their potential could be outside of or beyond the “conflicting and contradictory narratives” rather than thoughtfully developed in relationship to them. Ritchie and Wilson note that their study served to remind them, even in the late 1990s, that unfortunately

positivist assumptions that suggest that knowledge exists independent of

knowers and can be broken down into discrete, quantifiable pieces still

dominate American classrooms, though, as students’ accounts suggest,

alternative perspectives arising from social constructionist, critical

pedagogy, cultural theory, progressive, and feminist perspectives are also

present, if sporadically, in their K-12 and college experiences. (32)

In their work, the intervention to positivist assumptions that Ritchie and Wilson offer is narrative itself. Narrative has long been accepted in both education and writing studies as an accepted, needed critically reflective practice; but positioning narrative as the Villain- turned-Hero (i.e., the “confusing and contradictory” narratives that Ritchie and Wilson describe are supplanted by scholarly narratives of “best” practices informed by “critical” or “progressive” perspectives, which are also difficult not to flatten and universalize in practice) also makes Narrative the central agent via scholarly intervention, rather than using narrative explicitly to help us see (not necessarily solve) our complex mess of experience that no single agent, practice, or linear trajectory can account for, much less

resolve. In Seeing Yourself as a Teacher, Elizabeth Rankin concludes that new writing teachers in her program remain ambivalent about the value of teaching largely due to their previous experiences with schooling, echoing Ritchie and Wilson’s study of preservice K12 teachers around the same time. Likewise, in Changing the Way We

Teach, Sally Barr Ebest expresses a strikingly similar sentiment regarding new writing teachers in English, locating the root of much new teacher resistance in how they were taught previously: “When graduate students are asked to reconceptualize their role in the classroom and those of their students, they are going against the view of higher education held by most of their professors. A single pedagogy seminar cannot overturn the mind-set held for over two centuries” (98). Unfortunately, though, drawing on theories of self- efficacy and schema theory, Barr Ebest maintains that any effort to “overturn” this mind- set “may fail if the students’ personal constructs are exceptionally strong or if change represents too great a challenge to their beliefs” (71)—still sedimenting students’ constructs and beliefs as hindrances to their effectiveness.

Even when new teacher research findings shift focus from teaching and educational histories to the teaching of writing specifically, the narrative of limitation unfortunately remains; new writing teacher experiences and self-understandings in relation to academic writing and composition pedagogy are often portrayed as hindrances in multiple ways. For instance, in “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing,” E. Shelley Reid notes that even a previous lack of difficult experiences with writing might hinder a new writing teacher’s ability to teach effectively (W201). But much of new teacher experience is not marked by lack of difficulty, but implicated in conflicts surrounding privileged conventions and discourses. Dryer argues that “novice instructors” often have

“considerable anxiety about—and frequent hostility toward—academic writing conventions,” and they “then [project] disconcertingly reductive versions of these anxieties and writing practices onto students” (421), without reflection on what they are doing (or not) (432). Further, in “Exploring Identity-based Challenges to English

Teachers’ Professional Growth,” Heather Camp argues that composition pedagogy in graduate education in English creates not just difficulty but dissonance for teachers with

K12 teaching experience: “dissonance between discourse norms can hinder teachers from appropriating disciplinary discourse and combining it with more familiar discourses that circulate in their schools” (17), a dissonance she says needs to be resolved in order to facilitate rather than stymy teachers’ professional growth (16-17).

Perhaps quite similarly, in Subject to Change: New Composition Instructors’

Theory and Practice, Christine Farris attributes new teacher writing practice to a combination of existing, implicit theories of writing (regardless of previous or present teaching experience), and the interaction of these theories with composition lore and socialization with students, instructors, disciplinary scholarship, and institutional conditions and change (cf Yancey, “Professionalization” 69-70). The more “workable” a teacher’s implicit theory is—in relation to the paradigm supported in her graduate program—the better off she will be. Yet despite acknowledging that “through the dynamic activity of teaching and self-reflection, [instructors will] continue to question and work toward what they perceive as meaningful change,” Farris still asserts early on that instructors “are limited by the implicit theory they bring to the instructional setting”

(9, emphasis mine), rather than constrained and enabled. Thus, new teachers are portrayed as being hindered by a previous lack of difficulty with writing, by conflicting

discourses about teaching writing across different domains, and/or by their implicit assumptions about writing in relation to those held by faculty in their graduate programs.

While I do not believe that the above stories are intended to call new teachers proleptically into positions of deficit or limitation, they unfortunately do just that, in ways that we need to interrogate and interrupt rather than reproduce, however unintentionally.

As Yancey maintains, “In its design, a TA development program constructs us all— students, TAs, faculty, and administrators—in ways we plan, in ways we do not”

(“Professionalization” 74); and I contend that the same is true for the body of scholarship constructed around our programs and enculturation practices. Just as our educational practices as a culture are behind our theoretical understandings of knowledge-making and learning (as Barr Ebest and Ritchie and Wilson assert), and as new teacher preparation practices for too long have proceeded on an outdated transmission model (as Latterell,

Wilhoit, and Goleman have each argued)—so too would I argue that our disciplinary stances toward new teacher research are similarly lagging behind our more generous readings of our undergraduate students as capable learners rather than not-knowers. Too often, then, we proceed, however implicitly, on a deficit model rather than on the one that

Yancey advocated in 2002: a model of development in which new teachers need to be positioned as learning by experience and coming in with experience that is mediated by disciplinary practica, readings, and mentoring (“Professionalization” 69-70), yes, but in ways that are enabling and not just constraining and that we can all learn from. The latter is especially important if, in practice, we are to acknowledge what we “know,” that knowledge does not “[exist] independent of knowers” and cannot “be broken down into discrete, quantifiable pieces” (Ritchie and Wilson 32). It is also just as crucial that we put

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into practice our own moral stance toward ineffective dictatorial education, as Dryer notes: we “know” we should not “be like the smug indoctrinators who ran Nancy

Welch’s teaching practicum to suit their ‘identity-changing, ideologically situated assumptions’” (424) because forced conversion by replacing someone’s identity constructs and experiences with our own disciplinary constructs and paradigms is not a particularly effective nor inclusive model for productive learning.

One Possibility for Restorying #1 and #2

To interrupt the above narratives of new teachers’ deficits and limitations—and the assumptions about newcomers embedded within them—I rely on a both/and approach to identities as both constraining and enabling for two reasons. First, because it is a more generous and generative approach to newcomer enculturation and learning, compared to models of transmission or conversion in earlier new teacher research studies and practice.

And second, because it allows the complex to remain complex without being preemptively flattened and relegated to an existing narrative groove. I assume, as a foundation of this chapter (and my project as a whole), that new teachers are learning and their laminated identities are learned and storied in and over time. In

“Chronotopic Lamination: Tracing the Contours of Literate Activity,” Paul Prior and

Jody Shipka rely on the concept of chronotopic lamination to trace the literate activity of undergraduate academic writers with the intention of showing how writing “emerges as complex dispersed activity…across time and space” (206). They use lamination as an analytic to describe how ways of being in the world are multimotivated and multimediated, situated in specific chronotopes (or time-spaces, a la Bakhtin) (Prior and

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Shipka 186-87), made visible in the artifacts they elicit and analyze via semiotic remediation to defamiliarize the heterogeneous activity of everyday writing practices.

Rather than focus on remediation, as Prior and Shipka do, I focus on storytelling as one way to make the familiar just strange enough to help those who are more experienced see identity learning as a still unknown, uncertain, often unarticulated component at work during any newcomer enculturation moment or activity. This means that I am privileging narrative as the cultural tool that serves as both the object and means of my analysis

(Wertsch, Voices of the Mind) in order to trace individuals’ complex educational histories that have shaped (however tacitly) their teaching identities and desires. I appreciate Prior and Shipka’s working definition of histories as “multiple, complexly interanimating trajectories and domains of activity” (181), as well as their insistence that no form of cognition comes in any “at-hand toolkit—however heterogenous” (183). And narrative is no exception, functioning as a way of being that works to make meaning by actively constructing our realities (Bruner, “Narrative Construction of Reality”) and shaping who we become (Sfard and Prusak).

While Prior examines the ontogenesis of writers (Writing/Disciplinarity: A

Sociohistoric Account of Literate Activity in the Academy) or the ontogenesis of a biologist (“A Sociocultural Framework for Academic Writing”) in and through a variety of writing practices, I examine in the following sections the ontogenesis of writing teachers whose laminated identities are multimotivated and multimediated in ways that are neither good nor bad but always powerful and mixed (Stewart). Sometimes, identities are explicitly marked; they are also largely implicitly internalized and enacted. Perhaps most importantly, identities are narrativized and recombinatorial in ways that exceed any

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singular disciplinary or identarian label; and they require deep rhetorical listening to illuminate, unpack, and better understand.

One Way to Read Teacher Scripts: Laminated Roles

Schank and Abelson maintain that stories “make use of scripts” (41). As such, stories are therefore instantiations of individual tellers’ understandings of the scripts/structures in which we take up certain roles and through which we become recognizable to each other. Yet there are endless ways to analyze stories and their use of scripts, as is evidenced by the number and complexity of terms I have already employed in this chapter: scripts, narratives, and stories, roles, positions, and lamination. What the frameworks I describe above have in common is their densely layered complexity that we can put to work toward studying increasingly capacious understandings of motivated human action and identity development over time. In this section, I describe how (and why) I chose to code for roles and analyze participants’ laminated identities and narrative trajectories, which are themselves densely composed of complex pasts and actively shaped by present preoccupations and desired futures.

Table 1 To study laminated identity learning, I Research Questions for Coding Chapter Three chose to code for teacher-performed roles in all

1. Who do new teachers in my participants’ stories from my full corpus, study think teachers are and should be? combining a major unit of social organization 2. Who do new teachers think they should be—and who do (from Lofland, Snow, Anderson, and Lofland) they want to be—as with an aspect of that unit of social organization teachers and learners in our field? (Saldaña 16-17). Saldaña’s given examples of 3. Where do new teachers’ stories come from? 103

units include cultural practices, episodes, encounters, and roles; given examples of aspects include cognitive, emotional, and hierarchical (16-17). In this case, I chose roles as my unit of social organization and focused on relational aspects of those roles in order to examine not just who is doing what, but also who is performing what role in relation to whom, as a means of illuminating implicit social and narrativized scripts for teaching and learning embedded in participants’ stories of their own recalled experiences. To analyze relational aspect of teacher roles, I did not code for any and all social roles individuals were performing across all participants’ stories (e.g., student, child, co-worker, tutor).

Instead, I coded for roles that teachers were performing when participants marked that teaching and/or learning were occurring within stories. For this round of coding, then, I used split coding, marking as many roles as I saw present within stories, rather than lump coding, which would mark one predominant role in a story overall (Saldaña 23-24). In my split coding, I also subcoded (Saldaña 91-94) for the social types of roles that teachers performed. Given examples from Saldaña include “bully, tight-ass, geek” (16); my corpus leant itself to different roles, such as facilitator, teller, talker, and caretaker, though there were also tales of leeches, victims, villains, and martyrs. In coding for roles often implied rather than stated (though some are more clearly linguistically marked than others), I could begin to interpret what Saldaña calls “latent” or “underlying” meanings within data (94) about who participants think teachers—and they as writing teachers— are, should be, and should be becoming.

In addition, I performed a round of simultaneous lump coding to indicate where participants’ stories come from, to mark more “manifest” or “apparent” aspects of stories as well as the latent or underlying ones (Saldaña 94-97). In this round of coding, I relied

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on descriptive coding (Saldaña 102-105) on two levels. First, I coded for the source or origin of the story: if the story, as a unit, emerged from participant’s own firsthand experiences (of their own teaching experiences, student experiences, or memories of public discourse or pop culture), or if the story, as a unit, was told to participants by someone else (such as a parent, roommate, spouse, or peer). I sorted these stories loosely into categories to mark (1) participants’ own teaching experiences, (2) stories relayed via family and friends, and (3) stories remembered from media and pop culture, such as film.

Second, I also coded for the chronotope of the experience, when and where the story took place. Primarily, I marked what level of schooling the teaching story represented: primary, secondary, undergraduate, or graduate experiences. I also used this round of coding to mark the stories that represented and projected participants’ imagined futures.

Then, based on the teacher roles present across individuals’ stories, I constructed an initial teaching profile for each participant. These methods gave me one way of seeing stories of complex pasts and imaginings for desired futures, allowing me to delineate between teachers’ own experiences and those stories told about teachers and teaching from other sources.

The following sections present my initial findings and relevant analysis in three parts. The first is an overview of the roles I saw present in participants’ stories, including those most and least prominent. The second is an analysis of the least prominent roles, which came from others’ stories about teaching and which participants marked as conflicting and dispreferred. And last, the third section gives a more granular case study analysis of Nigel, one of the two newest teachers participating in my study, whom I interviewed in the middle of his first year of teaching. I trace Nigel’s stories “actions

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anticipated, in progress, and recalled” (Bruner, Actual Minds 106) as one particularly telling case of someone whose own memories, experiences, and projections offer better models for learning than many of the stories he has been told and certainly many of the stories we continue to tell about new writing teachers.

Overview of Teacher Roles: Yours, Mine, Ours

Before, during, and after my coding process, I had already been exposed to my own lifetime of experiences with and stories about teachers, which inflected the codes I developed. I had thought deeply about the teaching roles commonly represented in disciplinary scholarship, whether explicitly in “how to” manuals or implicitly in composition readers. As a graduate student in three very different institutions and programs, I have been “trained” using Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, the then-recent second edition of Cross Talk and St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, and the Norton Book of Composition Studies. Before beginning interviews, I observed ENGL

602 Teaching College Writing, which began in part with a recent “how-to” manual specifically for newcomers, Informed Choices. As I proceeded with my project, I was also exposed to teaching roles represented in popular culture (Williams and Zenger) and articulated in higher education scholarship (Bain). These roles—identified in scholarship for new writing teachers, from media representations, and in college teaching research (see Table 2)—represent a mix of preferred and dispreferred teacher roles and also indicate a typical scope for the kind of work we attempt in these contexts, crafting a manageable list for relatively easy digestion for newcomers (and perhaps for ourselves, too).

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By contrast, teacher roles from participants’ Table 2 Teacher Roles from stories exceed any manageable, easily digestible number. Scholarship

Lockhart and Roberge’s Two things are important to note about these roles. First, Informed Choices the most frequently appearing roles (see Table 3) in some Coach Model ways align with those marked in scholarship and also, as Facilitator Mentor befits my attention to the multiplicity of roles and Confidant Advocate relationships, in some ways offers an opportunity for a Gatekeeper Expert more granular reading of the complexities of teacher

Williams’ and Zenger’s roles being enacted throughout participants’ stories. And Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy second, the least frequently occurring roles (see Table 4)

Savior also align in more ways with the circulation notions of Sponsor Transformer teachers in popular narratives of American education Provider Illuminator (e.g., corrupter, leech), and many of them are also Sage notably dispreferred by participants in the contexts of Bain’s What the Best College Teachers Do their stories (e.g., corrector, sacrifice, victim).

Thinker Rather than building from codes to categories Questioner Learner beyond individual roles, I used these roles to create a Talker Teller profile of each individual participant32 based on the most Transmitter frequent roles present in his or her collection of stories— in order to trace individual laminated identities in some of their granularity, in the ways individuals are multimotivated and multimediated over time. Stories about previous

32 These in-depth profiles are present throughout this dissertation: Simone (this chapter, 123-24), Nigel (this chapter, 125-26), Penny (Chapter Four, 177-78), Violet (Chapter Five, 225-27), and James (Chapter Five, 237-41). 107

Table 3 20 Most Frequent Table 4 20 Least Frequent Teaching Roles in My Corpus Teaching Roles in My Corpus Critical reflector 83 Caretaker 8 Talker 64 Illuminator 8 Framer 46 Inviter 8 Facilitator 41 Leech 8 Learner 39 Motivator 8 Knower 36 Corrector 7 Questioner 34 Follower 7 Guide 29 Activator 6 Experimenter 27 Destroyer 6 Sequencer 25 Explainer 6 Assessor 21 Victim 6 Laborer 21 Disruptor 5 Clarifier 20 Evaluator 5 Bystander 19 Sacrifice 4 Teller 19 Corrupter 3 Relationship maker 18 Hero 3 Dictator 16 Lone wolf 3 Planner 16 Organizer 3 Change agent 15 Punisher 3 Encourager 15 Legitimizer 2 histories, current contexts, and future projections can reveal what is meaningful right now to individuals in ways that a search for a more generalized category would flatten, weaving in counterproductive assumptions of generalizability and of certainty regarding identities still “in-the-learning.” Each participant’s stories reveal an individualized uptake of previous experience and offer one way to examine individual concerns for the present and future. As Elinor Ochs and Lisa Capps write in Living Narrative:

co-tellers’ abiding and overwhelming concern with present and future

experiences affords how they remember, compose, interpret, and

otherwise construct a narrative logic for past experience. That is, how co-

tellers forge connections among past events is rooted in their

preoccupation with their lives at the moment and to come. (192-93).

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As a whole, my interview questions ask participants to remember and project narratives of the past and of the possible, with specific attempts (as also noted in Chapter Four) not to point to or pre-select specific “preoccupations.” Instead, I asked newcomers’ to tell me about good teachers, about unexpected classroom events (which could have been, and were, quite mixed), about ideal futures, and about memorable moments. And what I discovered in my reading of these collected stories (based on the coding methods described above) were patterns and variants for individual participants: in the roles and relationships within synchronic moments in time, on the one hand, and roles and relationships told over diachronic stretches of time, on the other.

In listening closely and repeatedly to the 248 stories in my corpus, I realized that tracing identities in stories across synchronic crystallized moments was one way to help me see—and listen for—new teacher identity learning beyond a singular disciplinary concern, such as academic writing (Dryer), process pedagogy (Farris; Barr Ebest), or ethos (Mortimer). I also discovered, throughout the process of my three rounds of interviews, perhaps what I assumed all along: confirmation that, regardless of subject matter or institutional level, teaching is very much about the storied relationships between human beings—and between human beings and knowledge-making—that do run on scripts, yes, but multiple scripts, wherein people are more complex than the rather sedimented roles of Teacher or Student in an academic classroom performing content- based tasks. And each of the scripts or structures in which we are recognized in multiple roles across domains has its own set of circulating narratives about who teachers are and should be, what they should do and how they should do it, in ways that newcomers have already—in many cases, rather productively—marked as preferred and dispreferred.

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Others’ Stories: A Tale of Too Many Binaries

In this section, I offer one salient finding from my analysis: new teachers bring in with them stories from family, friends, and media representations that are (1) the least complex of their stories, (2) the most explicitly conflicting in ways that participants cannot make sense of, (3) marked with negative teaching roles (such as many of those above: leech, martyr, victim, corrector, corrupter, and so on), and (4) generally associated with K12 education, with a noted absence of similar circulating stories and tropes of college teaching. Most importantly, these roles—while least frequent—are not just flattened, conflicting, negative, or decontextualized; they are also marked by participants as dispreferred. Though participants have frequently been retold troubling stories about teachers, they do not simply replicate what they have heard, internalized, or experienced in unreflective ways. In other words, though they have “bad experiences” with teachers and teaching, the participants in my study are not just hindered by those experiences; in fact, they acknowledge the flatness, the contradictions, the negativity, and mark these as traits and roles to work against in favor of more generative roles and relationships they have also experienced in their lives. Participants’ stories are one way to re-story the rather flattened tale that new teachers are limited by their previous experiences with and self-understandings of teaching, or that they reproduce the “bad teaching” they have experienced, rather than reflect critically on and push against limiting practices.

Stories about teachers, from others align with tropes and scholarship beyond our field in two categories: teacher stories circulating in public and popular culture narratives.

Though they are a small number of stories from my corpus (N = 248; n = 67), participants’ stories from friends and family about teachers have much in common with

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public narratives about teachers. These stories typically mirror—and reproduce—a generalized U.S. educational narrative with a long-standing conflict at its core: are teachers Victims or Villains?33 Self-sacrificing Miracle Workers for social change and equity, or contemptible Corruptors of American children and values? James describes the available options narrated from family members (and popular film) as “the teachers are ruining society somehow model” or “the one teacher who saved the day” model. For

James, the “destroyer” model is ecumenical across schooling levels, whether via K12 teachers’ unions or universities as “bastions of Marxist practice…ruining America” in what he describes as a “weird interconnected logic of PC culture and Marxism and professors and higher ed generally,” or in colloquial shorthand as “leftist professors are tanking the civilized Western world.” For others, the “destroyer” model is more focused on K12 education, inflected—as told by participants in their stories—by various intersections of conservative politics and reactions to educational and governmental tensions. When asked what stories her friends and family tell about teachers, Violet says:

Oh lots of anti-teachers’ union stuff, I’ll tell you that…they’re not helping the kids be better educated or whatever, but at the sa[me time]—I don’t know—lots of really conflicting things. Like also that teachers are way underpaid. So there’s that mix of stories about whether or not unions—like unions try to get teachers more rights is “bad,” but teachers need more rights.

In a later interview, Violet reflects on this “mix of stories,” identifying the conflicting messages not just within the scripts voiced by family members, but also in relation to scripts offered in media depictions of teachers, whether in fictionalized in film or shared via television journalism:

33 In the remainder of this chapter, I have capitalized roles from participants’ stories to draw attention to the multiple roles present as unobtrusively as possible. 111

It’s weird because people just have a lot of respect for teachers. But then sometimes the way they actually talk about teachers is—I don’t know. There’s this mythical teacher figure who’s very Dead Poets Society, or that teacher on “Ellen” [who gave her students clothes and even let one live with her]. But then also there’s “the other people corrupting the profession of teaching and making it into this progressive—” So much pressure.

This “mix of stories” is not just confusing, but adds a certain level of “pressure” that

Violet seems to have inherited and internalized. Like other participants, she still also feels the pressure of these stories even though she recognizes they send conflicting messages that do not make sense.

For Nigel, stories from family members are similarly focused on K12 and even further differentiated between primary and secondary school:

There were lots of different stories, types, genres maybe of stories that I sort of heard growing up. There was often the hero teacher sort of thing, the ‘oh how do they reach these kids’ thing or also the ‘teacher against the world.’

I had a neighbor who her daughter was an elementary school teacher. My mother would often tell me, ‘Can you believe that Ms. so-and-so’s going out, and she has to buy her own crayons?’ And there’s often that story.

There’s also a very conservative ‘you know, teachers, they don’t work [laughs]. They basically do nothing all day, and they want to form a union and take down our government’ [laughs]. Which is ridiculous. I know that’s not true. But I heard a lot of stuff about that… and for years I bought into that.

‘Good teachers’ to me were spending their own hard-earned cash to provide for their students. ‘Bad teachers’ are the guys who get extra money to be the football coach, and they don’t do anything. They just assign the same things, and they want to form a union and take down the government.

So yeah [laughs], I had these weird conflicting stories about it that made sense I think. So yeah, ‘if you’re teaching anything under middle school, you care about like the students and education. But above that, you’re

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basically just babysitting to earn a check and trying to do nothing.’ Right? And it’s stupid, I know it’s stupid, it’s so wrong now.

In his closing evaluation of multiple perceived, experienced binaries, Nigel directly points out something we all experience at one time or another: how we come to (or try to) break ties with the stories we have been told, which used to make sense to us (we think), and yet now seem absurd.

These stories from family and friends (and some other participant stories from online or television journalism) fall into the narrative groove of Villain or Victim, sacrificial lamb or contemptible Corrupter. These binaries are, unfortunately, quite old stories in conflicting narratives of U.S. education that slot teachers into polarized—and culturally and politically polarizing—positions: as untouchable Saints or unforgivable

Sinners, as selfless Martyrs or incompetent Leeches. At any given moment, educators can be demonized, their use value questioned and their livelihood directly threatened (at the state level, for example; see Blackford), or they can be perched on a precarious pedestal by political figures such as former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan: “Great teachers are performing miracles every single day… An effective teacher? They walk on water”

(Goldstein, “Teaching and the Miracle Ideology”). In The Teacher Wars: A History of

America's Most Embattled Profession, Dana Goldstein roots these centuries-long histories in an affective stance of anxiety stemming from our even more deeply rooted cultural fear about our children, government power, and civic welfare—and our longing for transformative figures to intervene in our moment of educational crisis (which has marked our history since before our nation’s beginning). Goldstein argues that horror stories of teachers are exaggerated beyond the scale they stand in for, acting as emblems

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of public fears of the failure of education. As a result, as Diane Ravitch details in The

Death and Life of the Great American School System, teachers enter the profession amid a battery of popular literature—Just How Stupid Are We?, The Dumbest Generation, The

Shallows, not uncoincidentally all written by elite educated white men—that suggests not what anyone in the U.S. is learning but how we are failing as an educational system, a country, and a culture (despite that a greater number of Americans attain a higher educational status than they did a century ago). Similar scathing indictments have also come in the form of films like Waiting for Superman and Rubber Room, which contribute to sedimenting narratives about U.S. educational system failures. Taken together, these public narratives offer a particularly troubling welcome for newcomers entering a contentious, politically charged profession in a role invested with tremendous responsibility and possibility, either for the transformation of young minds and the welfare of the nation or for the scorn of public outrage. Or quite possibly both—hence the

“pressure” that Violet mentions.

It seems telling, unfortunately so, that participants often state directly that they have been told very few “good” stories about teachers or education, and two in particular acknowledge how teaching stories are often gendered, untenable in different ways for women and men. Penny shares memories from her own experience as a high school student when others expressed their displeasure about certain teachers by attacking their intelligence and personality: “‘oh she has no idea what she’s talking about,’ or ‘this teacher’s such a bitch’… ‘she’s crazy,’ you know. Crazy, I think, is a word often used to talk about teachers who people don’t like.” Of course, “bitch” and “crazy” have particular connotations for women already built in; and it is further telling that the comments

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directed toward teachers using these words in Penny’s stories were all female, which she says leaves her feeling worried: “I worry so much about my students thinking I’m not doing a good enough job. And part of that is just my own insecurity. But I think part of it is that that’s the discourse we develop about teachers a lot.” In a later interview, Nigel also reflects on the untenable position of teaching for both women and men, which he said he had not thought about much before, in gendered ways that intersect with the

Victim or Villain binary:

And I remember it was my mother who often—and especially if it was a female teacher—gave the narrative of sacrificing teacher: “She bought all of that out of her own paycheck, or she”— There’s the “There’s a big bees’ nest in Mrs. M’s back yard.” It was in the newspaper, if you want the picture of it. I mean this thing was like this big, this huge hornet’s nest, and instead of destroying it, she went out of her way to kill the bees with something. I don’t know, DEET or something of the sort [laughs]. And she—at great sacrifice—many times she was stung—she snipped the thing and brought it into like a third grade science class and kept it there. “How cool is this, right? So you got the welts to show for it.” Right?

But then the same—often male teachers were often the lazy part of the union that’s bankrupting America, or you know the “oh those who can’t do, teach” thing.

In these instances, female teachers get to be bitches who don’t know anything, or self- sacrificial figures who perhaps cross barriers of ethics and safety and have the welts to show for it—both as a metaphorical professional punishment and as a storied trophy that outlasts the injury itself. Meanwhile, men are left rather on the sidelines to be lazy while

(as in Nigel’s earlier example) getting paid to coach football and/or “form a union and take down the government,” a “mix of stories” that is conflicting at best, nonsensical and damaging at worst. Such a mix also leaves me wondering about the consequences of the

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female lamb or male leech binary for new teacher identity learning in ways that would be productive to revisit with Nigel later.

Running alongside these public (and tacitly accepted) narratives often from family and friends are fictional stories from popular culture (most participants referenced films, though also some television), which more often fall into the specific media trope of

“teacher as individual agent transforming students en masse,” a story perhaps just as ungenerative. In popular film trajectories, a single teacher serves as an individual Hero who transforms the lives of all of his students (for these heroes are still more often male than not) despite overwhelming odds. In many participant stories, across interviews, this comes down to three words: Dead Poets Society. Initially, Penny spoke of this as a film, and type of film, that she loved: “I think a lot of what comes to mind is like movies about teachers, like Dead Poets Society, which I used to love when I was growing up, or like

Mona Lisa Smile—movies where there’s this great teacher who’s kind of different but changes everybody’s lives. You know, they learn so much.” Even for those like Violet who admit they’ve never actually seen the 1989 film, the ghost of John Keating, played by Robin Williams, lingers, whispering haunting inspiration in the ears of his young male students, who then reciprocate the wisdom, energy, and investment by standing on their desks in a grand gesture of solidarity that Violet has not experienced as a teacher, as evidenced in the opening epigraph: “you know, I really have to get past this notion that every class is going to be one of these Dead Poets Society moments where we’re all just like having a good time, we’re all inspired, you know, and having epiphanies.”

In Popular Culture and Representations of Literacy, Bronwyn T. Williams and

Amy A. Zenger suggest that such narratives of U.S. education and teaching are indicative

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of deeply ingrained beliefs about the relationships between literacy and education and the power of individuals to transform each other in sites of literacy education. Williams and

Zenger argue that “Triumph-of-literacy films often echo the meta-narratives that permeate literacy education from kindergarten through college” (145), namely that literacy is autonomous, singular, and desired, that literacy is acquired, possessed, and required for social participation and individual transformation. They also maintain that, if

“literacy brings liberation, love, personal fulfillment, and security to its learners,” then those who “bring” literacy are deeply responsible for the transformation of our individual and collective fulfillment and security (Williams and Zenger 157-58). In other words, if people need both literacy and sponsors of that literacy (borrowing from Brandt), then teachers are sponsors who serve as the means to “bring” or bring about literacy (or again, borrowing from Brandt, give permission). This “myth about providing literacy to those who do not have it” (Williams and Zenger 158) is deeply embedded in the films and television shows that participants remembered during our interviews: Dead Poets Society,

Mona Lisa Smile, Dangerous Minds, a “South Park” parody of Stand and Deliver. Many such tales of education focus on the determination of individuals, often outliers or underdogs, in what seem to be often dire social, economic, and historic circumstances marred by inequity. Since the latter situations are ultimately beyond the control of the educational system, the former figures are laden with the responsibility to make positive change happen. When teachers and students are involved in these scenes, teachers become the K12 Heroes who perpetuate two of the many myths that Williams and Zenger identify: literacy as salvation and literacy as transformation (with marked problems when

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these collide with literacy as commodity, as they do in Dead Poets’ Society; see Williams and Zenger, Chapter 8).

This cultural script is rife with not only pressure or worry that Violet or Penny identify—but also sometimes more deeply ideological, foundational troubles for relationships between students and teachers and those who are learning to navigate those relationships for the first time in the position of teacher rather than student. In a later interview, for instance, Penny retells an intervening experience in her graduate coursework that has given her a new perspective on some of the films she loved; she has, in some ways, “flipped the script” and considered that perhaps the fictionalized individual transformer can be dangerous in very real-life, consequential ways (as

Williams and Zenger highlight), rather than only showing us how one man might illuminate knowledge or save students via relationship-building in an inspired site of literacy education. “I’ve just had recent experiences that have shaped how I’m thinking about that teachers in pop culture issue,” Penny begins her story, backchanneling to our first interview five months earlier. During this intervening experience with a visiting scholar in a graduate class during the 2016 U.S. presidential election season, Penny has re-thought her initial love and our cultural valorization of the individual Hero represented by Keating:

We were talking about Trump34… So [the visiting scholar] was saying that he thinks that the reason why Trump is so successful is because—or not “the” reason why, but a parallel that he sees that is in the way we structure our classrooms and pedagogies traditionally. Not necessarily in rhetcomp classrooms but in elementary school, high school, education broadly conceived. So his deal was that we are taught to from a very early age to

34 Penny’s interviews were conducted from November 2015 to March 2016; and at the time of this story’s occurrence, Donald Trump (who went on to be elected president in November 2016) was not yet nominated as the Republican candidate for the U.S. Presidency. 118

just listen to the person in the front of the classroom and not really to participate or challenge them, and that we become really comfortable with that. So we have this person kind of telling us what to do, giving us what we need, giving us this knowledge and access and shaping how we’re thinking about things. And then we kind of get into the “real world,” and we don’t have that anymore—this teacher figure that’s just going to fix everything and is going to tell us what’s wrong and steps in.

And I’ve been thinking about that so much [laughs] because I’m obsessed with this whole Trump issue, and it freaks me out. It’s crazy. But I was like, “oh that makes a lot of sense.” And then I started thinking about these movies like Dead Poets Society. I think Mona Lisa Smile might have been another one I was thinking of, where you have these teachers that are these almost mythic transformative figures in their students’ lives—and how that can be actually really dangerous when it’s real life and people are expecting that and not getting it. And then you have somebody who steps in who is racist and misogynist and horrible in other ways who then is kind of like trying to offer this and be that figure for them.

So yeah I don’t know if that’s actually at all helpful to you or interesting. But it’s pretty—it really stuck with me. I’ve been thinking about it. I mean, that was a while ago now, and I keep thinking about it. But you know it’s complicated because those are such positive portrayals of teachers, and we look at that as a stand in for how transformative education can be and how great that one figure in your life can be. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that. I mean, I’ve talked about teachers who were like that for me, and that’s important. But it’s also—it can be really dangerous, if that’s the model of education that we expect, or that’s the only model we’re familiar with.

As Penny identifies, an intervening recent experience has changed her perspective on the stories that she came in with in ways that complicate a mass of already conflicting narratives, and yet also offer her a different place to stand in relation to those other narratives. Perhaps more importantly, Penny’s intervening experience also gives her a way to re-read the simple binary positions and to sit and struggle with trying to understand teaching as a both/and profession, in which her own experiences of teachers as transformative figures can still be true while she also is deeply concerned about the rather fascist model of education that such narratives can authorize and reproduce.

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Looking at others’ stories across participants reveals the multiple scripts that these five new writing teachers have already received and perceived that are, qualitatively, quite static, flattened, and lackluster—yet still lingering strong in individuals’ narrative histories of teacher stories told by others. In “Between Structure and Performance,” psychologist and narrative scholar Michael G. W. Bamberg maintains that we produce one another (and others) as social beings with roles in relation to each other in and through narrative performances. In advocating a performance-based pragmatic approach that studies how narratives are performed and for whom, Bamberg offers three levels of narrative positionality as a potentially useful heuristic: (1) characters in relation to each other; (2) speaker in relation to audience; and (3) narrator in relation to self (337). In these stories from others about teaching, Bamberg’s first level of narrative positionality is particularly visible and telling. At the first level of narrative positionality, researchers ask: Who is doing what? Who is the agent? What forces are at work? Unfortunately, characters in these stories function as generic straw-men or martyrs in generalized scenes, or specific individuals whose stories are narrated and interpellated through cultural tropes ready-made for others’ flattened tellings. It is important to note that, taken together, these entrenched stories offer new teachers with few visible options of succeeding or being beyond untenable, undesirable binaries—Victim or Villain, Lamb or Leech—that require extreme sacrifice or receive extreme censure.

Unfortunately, the roles for teachers in others’ stories are so scripted, they are already predicted not only by educational scholars like Dana Goldstein but also by narrative scholars like Bamberg, who writes:

At this [first] level [of positionality, i.e., characters in relation to each

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other], we attempt to analyze how characters within the story world are

constructed in terms of, for example, protagonists and antagonists or as

perpetrators and victims. More concretely, this type of analysis aims at the

linguistic means that do the job of marking one person as, for example: (a)

the agent who is in control while the action is inflicted upon the other; or

(b) as the central character who is helplessly at the mercy of outside (quasi

“natural”) forces or who is rewarded by luck, date, or personal qualities

(such as bravery, nobility, or simply “character”). (337)

His articulation of available narrative positions is starkly limited by the bounds of existing binary narrative tropes. As a feminist scholar, I am troubled by Bamberg’s statement and the binaries present in others’ stories of teaching, troubled by the lack of imagination, fluidity, and complexity, which is at best disappointing and at worst an ungenerous, rigid reading of the possibilities of narrative and storytelling; and I see even a small statement like the above as representative of an unfortunately much larger problem of finding what we look for in our research and in our lives. If we assume that narratives and those who constitute and tell them are ruled by an either/or situation—one can be a Hero or a Villain, a Victim or a Perpetrator, an Agent in control or the person being controlled, and so on—then we are more inclined to hear and read others’ stories based on this reductive understanding. In fact, I would also argue that we are then more likely to tell stories based on this understanding, too.

Equally problematic, the majority of even flattened representations of teaching focus on K12, with very few college teacher stories, and the imbalance in college writing teachers’ accidental apprenticeships in school (13 years in K12, four years in college, one

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to three years in graduate school) results in a sizeable gap where generative messages about college instruction could be. In reflecting back on my comment about his story of an undergraduate college teacher being one of the few representations of college teaching from participants, Nigel notes the absence of situated knowledge of college in his own history:

I think the only person who had ever done college in my family…my

father briefly. But he just partied at a two-year, didn’t get a degree… And

my stepfather—he had a four year degree and never really spoke—he

spoke more about fraternity life. He spoke about ‘oh it’s really just get out

and do it.’ He went to a business college, so in many ways it was flavored

a bit differently because it was a private business college. So college was

never on the radar. I never heard stories of teachers in college.

Even in our field, few scholars attend to representations of college professors in the media (Bauer; Carens); more often, our discipline both addresses and reproduces the literacy as transformation myth in the form of literacy and schooling narratives that often begin in K12 experiences and extend to higher education (Rose; Tompkins; Villanueva).

More broadly, “Heroes” in our field emerge in the form of exceptional (and elevated) male figures like Paulo Freire. Thus, unfortunately, such perceived individualistic masculinist narratives that focus on the wills of individuals to succeed within or despite the system—and that, in the process, elide or even occlude how situated learning works—are not solely K12 territory; even the few college stories circulating in public or popular narratives about teachers are not present in participants’ stories. And this entire scene is particularly problematic given that so much of our public and academic

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discourse situates higher education as an “arrival point” of sorts for students who want to be educated citizens.

Newest of the New: Still Identity Learning from Experience

Others’ flattened stories about teachers are even less impressive when juxtaposed with newcomers’ stories of their own experiences. Even the two newest teachers participating in my study—Nigel and Simone, whom I began to interview after their first semester of teaching—had far more detailed, interesting stories of their own experiences to share. Listening rhetorically to the stories from the participants in my study has yielded far messier understandings of human motivations and actions, more capacious understandings of identity and experience, and—most importantly—more complex scripts for teaching and for learning than the flattened, decontextualized narratives of dispreferred teaching roles above. For instance, one interesting correlation that emerged from Simone’s stories from different times in her life is an atypical relationship between

Assessor and Encourager. This relationship began in stories of a her high school AP

English teacher, who graded strictly but also encouraged improvement and learning hand in hand with grades, and who reappears in Simone’s more recent stories of enjoying assessing digital texts from her students. In Simone’s present stories, though, she describes herself as more “lenient” than “strict,” largely because she knows many of her students are experimenting with new digital tools, rhetorical moves, and multimodal production; so she performs the evaluative component of assessment differently than she was “taught” (perhaps because she has listened to and learned about her students and intuits that they are not necessarily the “grade-driven” she was in AP English), while still

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maintaining a similar affective component of encouragement. Her imagined future might include writing, editing, a 9-to-5 job for a while, maybe additional graduate school in an

MFA program; yet she does share her imagined “ideal” teaching life, which includes equalizing features such as “circling up” in class (also marked as something she learned from her AP English teacher in Socratic circles) to discuss writing in an encouraging, supportive workshop format (something she says she was very nervous about in graduate level courses, but also marks as the best classes she took as a graduate student). Most importantly, Simone’s stories, like other participants’, offer better—and explicit—models for teaching and learning than others’ circulating narratives of education.

In order to examine in-depth the narrative logic involved in new teachers’ laminated identity learning, I have chosen to focus on one participant, Nigel, as a case study for the remainder of this chapter. The stories below illustrate the teaching roles that his collected stories reveal are important to him in his current thinking of himself as a teacher (i.e., most frequent teacher roles marked as preferred or desired in his stories of teaching and learning). Rooted in time and place, Nigel’s teacherly narrative emerges— like his complex histories—from his current laminated identities and multiple stances

“rooted in [his] preoccupation with [his life] at the moment and to come” (Ochs and

Capps 192-93). Tracing his scripts for teaching and learning—via past stories of good teaching, current stories from his own teaching experiences, and future stories rooted in his desired projections for teaching—makes visible his experienced and imagined trajectories, which rely on building relationships with others and with knowledge in ways that are too often flattened or ignored (or glossed and aggrandized, in equally unhelpful ways) in public, popular, and even scholarly representations of teaching.

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Questioning Everything: A Case of Interrogating the Checklist

Nigel questions everything—the clarity of writing assignment prompts, the uninterrogated assumptions surrounding multimodal assessment, the promise of education and digital technologies to bestow prosperity. Of all participants, Nigel has the largest percentage of stories of schooling and education that are explicitly about teacher- student direct interactions, whether he features in them as a student or teacher. In his student stories, he now Questions the lock-step methods of Dictator-esque instruction in which students are given a checklist and instructed to follow the directions exactly in order to be declared “proficient” at whatever task at hand:

when I did do projects that you might loosely categorize as the “multimodal” project in courses, it was very much checkmarks. “Did you do this? Check. Did you do this? Check. Did you do this? Check. You are proficient at these tools. [laughs] Next.” So I’m like, ‘what makes it— what makes that effective communication?” I had no idea.

In his own teaching stories, then, it is no surprise that he talks about a different model he enacts and seeks to continue: one of Facilitating knowledge-making as a Guide rather than a Dictator, through the primary means of asking questions rather than telling students what to think, do, or write. It is also no surprise that many of his stories featured

(and enacted) a resistance to simplification. As a general stance toward education, Nigel resists the checkmarks that students want and that teachers might often find easier, too; so his questioning extends not only to direct student interactions but also to teacher acts of presentation and assessment, wherein he often marks simplification as dispreferred: “[my students] very much wanted the check marks. Like that’s how I looked at it. So I’m going to resist check marks. So I did. [laughs].”

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Nigel is the only participant who recounted a memorable college teaching experience that he marked as positive and told in great detail about a composition professor at his two-year college who ignited his interest in composition pedagogy by asking questions and, in the process, demonstrated a pedagogical method of analyzing one’s own thinking at a meta-level.

The reason I was into composition to begin with was my first community college course. So my first day on campus too, so that meant a lot to me. And it was J.A. was the guy’s name. It was the first class, just sort of everything you expected I think in a college professor: old, had a beard like an Amish man, literally a tweed jacket and a radio voice… So he asked us what we thought composition was, and nobody had any answers. Like, “you enrolled in the class and you had no idea what it was about? That’s okay, I understand, freshmen. That’s okay.” And then he proceeded to give us you know definitions of composition and ways of sort of figuring it out. And his sort of whole teaching philosophy that I latched onto was “I’m here to help you figure things out and help you think through things.” What a cool idea, right? It’s not catching mistakes, or catching language that’s necessarily bad, or “oh you did this scientific thing wrong.” He’s like, “I’m here to help you figure out ways of thinking.”

So we did all these weird sort of assignments where like, “All right, everybody think of as many white edible things as you can.” And then he’d interview us in front of class. “How many did you get? All right, where did you start? How did you do it? Did you start with like major like grains and go all grain? Did you do this?” We all had different ways of going into it, and I’m like, “this is a fascinating field. This is what this guy does? How fun is that?”

Or, “Name every country that begins with the letter ‘I.’ “Okay, where did you start? You started in Italy. Then what did you do? You figured out spatially.” Some people were like trying to go alphabetically because they had seen these maps, and so I’m like, “This is a cool thing, just engage with how people think and ways of organizing.”

So I go, “That’s what I want to do in life.” And I told my friends or told girlfriends [when they asked], “what do you want to do?” “Okay, so there’s this professor I had in college, and he was all very much like, ‘so there’s a light switch over there, Nigel. Here’s one way to get over there. There’s another light switch on this wall. Whenever you’re ready, just you know, you don’t have to be in a dim room, so.’ So yeah, that I think is sort of the most memorable teaching moment, and it’s not like a “this” [points finger down at table], like “right then and there,” but it’s a whole collection of things.

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In addition to being the only participant who shared a specific undergraduate college teacher experience, Nigel was also the only participant who indicated a desire to

“become” a composition instructor before getting to graduate school and becoming a classroom teacher for the first time in our program. (By contrast, most others’ stories don’t reveal this information; and Simone marks herself as someone who loved creative writing and literature but “hated writing” and did not think she would be teaching it one day.) His story of J.A. as a good teacher is a particularly strong telling of his own decision-making process along a narrative trajectory of being a certain kind of teacher, a

Questioner-Guide who helps students explicitly and collaboratively figure out ways of thinking. Nigel’s story also reveals some of his current and projected “preoccupations”

(as in Ochs and Capps 192-93) for his teaching. As a teacher, he does not want to “catch mistakes” or label language as “bad,” or point out what students have done “wrong.”

Instead, he wants to help them figure out ways of thinking, make sure they collaborate in order to see that individuals have “different ways of going into” thinking, and “just engage with how people think and ways of organizing.” This seems to mark for Nigel a set of relationships he appreciated and found “fun” and “fascinating,” not just relationships between students and teachers, but also between thinkers and knowledge- making. After making the clearly marked statement of intent—“That’s what I want to do in life”—he qualifies how he sees “that” in an embedded narrative of any number of remembered conversations about “what he wanted to do in life,” told using his own remembered speech/voice with J.A.’s imagined, invoked voice further embedded within:

“Okay, so there’s this professor I had in college, and he was all very much like, ‘so there’s a light switch over there, Nigel. Here’s one way to get over there. There’s another

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light switch on this wall. Whenever you’re ready, just you know, you don’t have to be in a dim room.’” Nigel’s ending to this first story from our interviews illuminates a script for teaching and learning that is theoretically sound with practical implications. He seems aware of multiple paths to any learning experience (i.e., more than one light switch and more than one way). Furthermore, he also seems to understand learning as motivated rather than forced and something that happens over/in times not of the teacher’s choosing: “Whenever you’re ready, you don’t have to be in a dim room.”

Each of these takeaways, of course, applies to any learning experience, not just teaching writing, though Nigel’s story occurred in a composition classroom, which contributed to his trajectory of being a writing teacher. When asked if this experience might have changed how he performed as a student, Nigel’s follow-up story reveals how other domains of activity, such as work, influenced his performance as a student even more so than his own interest in or expectations for a college writing course:

To a degree I sort of expected it to be just writing, and I enjoyed writing. But I also was working as the editor for the newspaper at the time and really like was worried about taking student loans. So that class I cared a lot about because that class felt like it was investing in me, too. He knew my name. I saw him around campus. So when my measly little editor stipend came in, I bought the Raymond Carver book as opposed to buying the Intro to Psychology book, which I’m like, ‘I will just Google those things.’

…And if I was going to skip a class during the week because I didn’t have gas money or just didn’t want to go—which are like two very different reasons to do it [laughs], but they both existed—it would never have been that MWF course. I’d be like, I’ll skip my Tuesday courses. I don’t want to bump into him and have him—not have gone.

The focus of story quickly shifts from the domain of activity referenced at its outset—

Nigel’s work as a newspaper editor—to the interpersonal relationship between Nigel and

J.A. While Nigel states that he felt as if “the class” was “investing” in him, the remainder

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of his response tells a different story about his own investment in the class because of his relationship with J.A. as someone he seems to have admired and did not want to disappoint. It’s doubtful that any collection of Raymond Carver short stories would have a straightforward transferrable impact on Nigel’s job at the newspaper; and clearly he was concerned with the financial strain of student loans to pay for books as well as transportation. Yet the book he ended up with—and remembers still today—and the class he made sure to attend was the one in which he admired and wanted to model the instructor for his capacious views toward writing pedagogy and approach to knowledge- making through active thinking, constant questioning, and visibly collaborative “figuring it out.”

It is also vital to note the complexities of power present in this and other stories from Nigel, who has the privilege to learn from a male teacher who is like him in some ways but is also experiencing complex “firsts” of being a working class first generation college student. In a sense, Nigel’s single story here defies several norms then. The first is a statistical norm in our field, in which there are typically more female instructors than male; and this is also the case in the graduate and writing programs of which Nigel is currently a member. In this story from his past, then, we see Nigel identifying with his male instructor as well as male authors (in this case, Cathedral by Raymond Carver, and

Nigel later mentions reading Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse as well), answering questions in/through which bodies remain unmarked (a state this is immediately complicated in

Nigel’s own teaching stories, shared later in this section). Such identification is an unmarked privilege in Nigel’s story, one that is not so easily shared by many contemporary college students: particularly women and men of color in a field that is still

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predominantly white, as well as others who identify as queer, disabled, or multilingual in ways that may or may not be so visibly marked. Yet this and others of Nigel’s stories also reveal the way in which he does not identify with middle class norms often assumed and privileged in education. In addition to the underscoring the materiality of his circumstances—in which he must choose sometimes to buy books or put gas in his car—

Nigel’s story also points to what might be an increasingly statistical norm but is often unmarked or overlooked in much of our scholarship and especially invisible in new teacher research: how many of Nigel’s “firsts” take place on a two-year college campus rather than at a four-year institution, which is often presumed and privileged in much of our disciplinary research and scholarship. Nigel’s first day on a college campus is his first day on a two-year college campus, and his first two-year college class is his first composition course—a confluence of firsts not often narrated and traced for new writing teachers in our field. Together, these issues of power and privileging point to the complexities of embodied experiences for newcomers in ways that are narratively recombinatorial, developing and shifting over time upon further experience and later reflection.

Similar themes are present in Nigel’s stories from his own recent teaching experiences. The “first” of his own teaching experiences that he shared with me was about asking his class to read A.M. Homes’ short story “Things You Should Know,” for a

“different first day” experience, similarly structured to the “first day” in J.A.’s composition course. Rather than getting at ways of organizing thinking via lists, Nigel as

Questioner asks students to generate ideas about what they “should know” and book-ends this activity—at the beginning and at the end of the course—to create and reflect a self-

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motivated, self-generated relationship between students, knowledge-making, and their presence in his first-year writing course. Nigel also marks those lists as a way for students

“to bring themselves into class,” playing the role of Inviter, which worked better with some assignments rather than others. By contrast, he also shared a story about asking students to articulate their ideal learning spaces, which quickly became highly sexualized readings of classroom student-teacher relationships, in the form of student comments that rated their professors—and themselves—on the 1 to 10 scale of hotness and returned an alarming number of times to an insistence that a professor not skip “leg day” at the gym.

So “questioning everything” is not presented as a perfect teaching strategy free from misfires.

Nigel’s stories of his own teaching experiences do represent questioning as a flexible means not just to get students to think but also to keep teachers from being

Dictators or Judges, as evidenced in his stories about multimodality in our field, in a specific multimodal assignment in our program, and with a specific student’s digital project. At the storyboarding stage of a 60-second video project, a student had generic college campus images for her video on prejudice against body modification and tattoos.

After Nigel Encouraged the entire class to create and use their own artifacts to work toward a better developed ethos, the student working on body modification was one who

“took that to heart” in a way that enabled Nigel to continue to use his questioning strategy, but modify it for an uncomfortable moment between male teacher and female student.

I had another student—the student who was writing about body modification—share modeling pictures, which were maybe R rated. So she had a tattoo here [points to lower front torso], and they were professionally taken. But totally puts me in a weird place.

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“Oh that’s you, scantily clad in your rough video draft—okay. Now what do I do?” Do I—I totally wanted to say, “I’m so glad that you embraced this, you owned this sort of thing, and that this is your ethos you can talk about it. Because even as you know I’ve got some [tattoos] here and here and here [points to arms], I embrace that. But it puts me as a teacher—you’re sending me photos that, I don’t know, you could find—they’d be on television, nothing pornographic, obscene about them. But they’re towing the line pretty hard.”

… And I felt like the student made this sort of—took my advice to heart, but maybe in a way that should be pressed on a little bit. So I talked to her after class. I go, “so it should be—understand this is a weird place for me as your teacher to receive that. And I think it makes a lot of sense…and the first thing I wanted to tell you was ‘is this something you’d be willing to show maybe a future boss? Something you’d be willing to have on the Internet?’ Even that is sort of tied in with these prejudices against body modifications and tattoos and stuff.”

I go, “I think maybe there’s a different way to show your ethos that makes me a little less you know uncomfortable, and we’d be able to show in class if we have the time to show it in class. So you know I’m not going to take off points or anything like that. I actually think it was a really smart move rhetorically, and I think it’s disruptive in a lot of ways. But I mean if I were—I just don’t know what to do about this”… She was like, “oh, I just, you know, it was the best picture I had to sort of demonstrate this.” And I was like, “well, do you have tattooed friends that are artists? You could focus on what they’re doing here, or like stock images or something, but you can see your face in it too?”

… And I still think it was a savvy thing to do, savvy performance um, but whether it’s savvy enough in that particular situation? [laughs] Or whether it’s the type of savviness you want in that type of [situation]?

Within the story, identities-in-progress for both Nigel and his student are multimotivated (for a grade, for class presentation, to speak up about an issue important to her personally; to Protect a student, to ease his own discomfort, to Encourage students to create artifacts and texts that fit their ethos and purpose), multimediated (from images of a generic college campus to a revealing torso tattoo), across domains of activity (from imagined workplaces and friends’ tattoo parlors to the university classroom). While in

Nigel’s remembered stories J.A. seems to be working toward opening up ways of

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thinking, his own teaching stories are aptly grounded in situated, localized understandings of specific writing assignments and the program-endorsed focus on the

60-second digital project on a community or diversity issue. Yet his first strategy of asking students to think about how they are creating ethos in the specific artifacts they select backfires according to his retelling, shifting the conversation to questions of what is appropriate for what situation and purpose. In these contexts, Nigel feels he must

Negotiate his own role and find a way to “press on” the students’ choices when he wants to Guide them to think rhetorically (in line with programmatic student learning outcomes). So he acknowledges the rhetorical stickiness of making arguments to those prejudiced against body modifications by using rather risqué images that might further sediment their opposition. When the student responds, it is unclear whether she is indicating she hasn’t thought about it but might be concerned, or is dismissing the concern by dodging the question. And Nigel responds with a much more guided question that isn’t really a question but a rather explicit embedded suggestion: “well, do you have tattooed friends that are artists? You could focus on what they’re doing here, or like stock images or something, but like you can see your face in it too?” Situated within a script that suggests certain relationships for students with their teachers and with knowledge- making and rhetorical choices, he does not want to be the kind of teacher who tells his students exactly what to do. So Nigel seems caught in a tension to Encourage the student’s choice outright—“I totally wanted to say, ‘I’m so glad that you embraced this’”—and to cautiously suggest that circulating such images of her own body might have consequences beyond the time-space of the classroom. Though initially “reluctant” to share this story, Nigel marks the student’s move as “savvy” while perhaps not “the

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type of savviness you want.” Later, Nigel also reveals his concern about whether or not to talk to someone in the program about how to respond to this student, because he is afraid that telling someone “might get [the situation] blown out of proportion.” In this scene,

Nigel experiences the affordances of guiding students via rhetorical strategies, learning that rhetoric—like teaching—is no easy solution and can contribute complications that require further action.

Mediated by the narrative of the “good teacher” he has experienced, Nigel’s identity learning in this scene (and others) is also motivated by the kind of teacher he wants to be/come as that narrative bumps against his own affective experience of embodiment in the classroom. In his retelling, he believes he found a way to be honest with this student about his discomfort as her male teacher, despite that he must face the pedagogical discomfort of changing tactics without becoming too authoritarian. Nigel’s experiences with deploying pedagogical strategies—asking his students to deploy rhetorical strategies to improve their ethos in relation to a specific audience—are affective as much as they are rhetorical. In this instance, Inviting students to bring themselves into the classroom has made Nigel uncomfortable, though the student seemed not to be (in his recollection and retelling). Rather than only open up broad questions about structuring and organizing knowledge-making through lists and writing and “first day” icebreakers, Nigel finds his openness to student exploration and encouragement for them to push boundaries has resulted in more powerfully charged conversations in the form of potentially sexualized images that are “towing the line” and might be circulated to the class and likely beyond (as many students can and do easily share the videos they make and can upload to YouTube or other social media). Unlike some of his other

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stories, in this one Nigel finds himself outside the realm of the relatively innocuous questions—about white foods, names of countries, things to know, or even ideal learning spaces—and in a situation that he feels warrants more targeted questions than the general

“figuring it out” approach of J.A.’s. Nigel’s story of his experience as the teacher, rather than the student, show complex layers that are laminating his own understanding of teacher-student interactions: of what it means to be a white male teacher in a classroom with female student bodies both present in the room and represented in artifacts for digital composing projects, a dynamic that was not present in his “good teacher” story of

J.A.

Nigel’s scripts for how learning works from/in his past—as a student and as a teacher—are visible in his imagining of an “ideal day in his life a teacher in the future,” a projection seldom recruited in new teacher research that is vital to deepening our knowledge of identity learning if we situate identity as a “learning trajectory” (Wenger

149) and understand that a newcomer’s “sense of trajectory gives [him] ways of sorting out what matters and what does not, what contributes to [his] identity and what remains marginal” (Wenger 155) (explored in depth in Chapter Five in relation to stories and storied talk about teacher texts composed with students in mind). In his future projection,

Nigel says he wants to work with first-year college students to Question “things that are just happening in the world” and is aware that he would give assignments that may lead to “uncomfortable discussions” with students about their choices in ways that he knows he cannot control. In his orientation to this story, Nigel says he sees himself working with

“a pretty diverse [student] population” “at maybe a mid-sized university,” teaching upper division writing courses, maybe working with graduate students, and teaching the first-

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year experience course in the story below: “my ideal day is we all sort of agree just for a moment on what a good classroom is, and it just happens.”

…And then I also teach a first year experience or first year seminar, something that is like everyone goes to it, everyone has to be in it. It’s not a “oh you got such and such a score on the Compass test or such and such on the ACT or SAT or whatever new standardized things the world imagines” right [laughs] “in the future.” It’s a first year seminar. It’s capped at maybe 15 students. And it’s a twice a—it’s a two-semester seminar, because those exist. And I think those are pretty cool. And you keep the same students throughout it.

So it’s in the second semester, and the population of students goes from the extremely privileged to very underprivileged students. And we’re all together as equals. We sit probably in some way in a circle or some sort of closed loop, triangle, rhombus, whatever [laughs]. And we’re talking about writing, but we’re talking beyond writing. So we’re looking at things that are just happening in the world. We’re looking at ways we’re coming together and saying, “yeah you know what? It’s fucked up that we care about this and not that,” or “how shitty is it that people will say Gore Vidal’s a public intellectual, but we can’t say like Kanye West is,” right?

And they’re—and afterwards we all [laughs]—maybe an assignment is make a protest sign. “What are you protesting, and how are you rhetorically savvy in there? What’s your protest strategy?’ And I invite you know, “if you want to—if your protest is standing outside of Planned Parenthood, how are you rhetorically effective there?” And “if your protest is doing something else, how are you rhetorically effective there?” As a way of saying, “yeah there’s issues that we are going to disagree with, but there are also underlying sort of strategies and issues that we can discuss with.” Because I want to be totally inclusive. But I’m—you know, that’s actually part of the problem, too, is that. But to have those uncomfortable discussions with students and be better equipped to have them and to do so respectfully. So that would be my ideal day.

Nigel is quick to assert that his “ideal day” in his future teaching life would take place in an Equalized classroom of first-year students, not those who pass a certain standardized test or are members of advanced composition courses, as he noted that he was at his two-year college. As evidenced in who enters his classroom and how they position themselves in relation to each other, his story implicitly questions the sedimentation of academic “tracks” as well as explicitly questioning the cultural

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formation of public intellectuals (a course theme in one of his recent research-intensive first-year writing classes). And he grounds his future projection in, unsurprisingly, questions—interrogating what students think, what culture dictates, and why students might use particular strategies. In brief, Nigel’s hopes for equalization and the centrality of the role of Questioner, both underscored in/through his own (hi)stories, are mediated in both face-to-face large group discussion and one-on-one conversations with students in ways that seem to become increasingly complex in both his experience and his imaginings.

Perhaps most importantly in Nigel’s imagined future is not only who he is but also who he is not: someone who finds certainty and comfort in formulaic or authoritarian approaches to education, or even in sedimented, static notions of expertise. For instance,

Nigel does not want to reproduce the structure of some of his high school experiences

(with digital technology education in particular):

You get the big textbook. “Turn to page 114. Do this module. Take the mouse. Click here.” Get into rote memorization of “Oh that’s, so you save here.” “Save it in this format.” So yeah, high school’s really shitty [laughs] in that way. …it was very much becoming proficient with the tool. I don’t know, I think their expectation was the tool’s never going to change. But it has.

Though this approach of “rote memorization” or a kind of practiced muscle memory is notably absent in his imagined future, he returns to similarly themed stories repeatedly in his retellings of the past, across school and work domains. Later, he juxtaposes that experience with the four-year college experience he had nearly 10 years later, where he says “we didn’t learn how to use the tools…. I think their whole paradigm at the college level was ‘We want to teach you to think about the tools and what you can do with these

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tools.’” Yet, as pedagogical approach, this was most explicitly pointed out to him not in a college classroom—or in a writing program—but during an early tutoring work experience. When helping someone with a computer task, Nigel remembers being interrupted by a supervisor who said, “I appreciate that you’re taking time to help him learn new things. I’m going to make one rule though. You’re not allowed to take the mouse from him. You’re not allowed to type on the comp[uter].” Nigel recounts, “so that was when I—‘oh wait a minute! I can be really aware of the methods of going to teach, or the way I do it,” an awareness that he says he also exercised in other workplaces, whether in a community theater or teaching sailing to youth in Canada. Together, these events and stories are recombinatorial in Nigel’s laminated identity learning and development—transformed and transmuted across motivated activities, not simply reproduced from one educational site to another. His rhetorical approach to learning is not the Simplification process he detested as a high school student; and his rhetorical approach to teaching is not the Martyr or Leech models that actively haunt the stories he remembers from family, friends, and media representations. More productive approaches are present in his stories, in and through which he works through relationships between conflicting narratives and emerges with his own “resist the checkmarks” and “question everything” approach, which J.A. modeled in Nigel’s early college experiences and that

Nigel now enacts—not without its own challenges—in his classroom.

While I do not want to put too much emphasis on a single relationship—between

Nigel and J.A. (especially given their atypical gendered relationship within contemporary writing classrooms)—it is telling that that story is one of Nigel’s most detailed and memorable, that it clearly represents multiple motivations and the collisions of multiple

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domains of activity, and that in it he most explicitly states his desired trajectory for his future (unless otherwise cued to do so by my interview questions). It is also curious that he does not reference J.A. again in any of his stories despite that the roles most frequently told in his own teaching stories—Questioner, Facilitator, and Guide—begin as early as this story with J.A. but not sooner, roles that are still markedly present in his

“preoccupations” with his life “at the moment and to come” (Ochs and Capps 192-93).

This combination of prominent roles—as well as the complexity of other roles in Nigel’s stories—itself resists the simplification of any discrete list offered in scholarship or in teacher textbooks, just as his stories tell of some of the complications (actual and imagined) of enacting these roles in the embodied contexts of the contemporary writing classroom. Notably, reading Nigel’s stories of teaching and learning over time are telling of scripts for learning—his own as well as the students in his courses—mediated and motivated in ways that include but are not limited to any traditional focus on authorized experiences in a writing/graduate program or academic writing histories in new teacher research. Even Nigel’s situated stories of the writing classroom do not suggest he needs to know more about writing or grading, or is struggling to become a more confident academic writer, or desires to teach his students any specific composition paradigm, process, or theory; instead, they often illustrate interpersonal relationships that have opened—and may continue to open—up new possibilities for Nigel to make relationships with students as well as with thinking, writing, rhetoric, and knowledge in ways that resonate with him. Just as importantly, in his stories, Nigel typically recognizes the unevenness of those possibilities, which are messy and not guaranteed, but speaks of any role or relationship as preferred if it encourages him to abolish “the checklist” and

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proceed along his own path toward the light switch or in writing the “things you should know” list for himself. Also notable, Nigel’s scripts of/for learning and moments of relationship-building are mundane, often open-ended or truncated, sometimes hazy on specifics and absent of inspiring speeches and deeply life-altering epiphanies. In other words: not very Dead Poets Society at all.

Conclusions

Examining newcomers’ scripts of/for learning via their laminated teaching identities, as learned and storied over time, illustrates several challenges and hopes—not just for new teachers but also for all writing scholars invested in studying and supporting new teachers in our field and newcomer identity learning and development more broadly.

Within the contexts of our evolving disciplinary research and teaching methods, I see three key challenges, each of which is tied to a problematic conception of identities: as flattened, as narrow(ed), and as limiting, rather than as dynamic, multiple, and enabling as well as constraining. The first challenge is that newcomers are still surrounded by flattened narrative tropes of teaching that are full of unproductive binaries and conflicting roles for any teacher, much less for one is new to the profession and working through/into a position for the first time. Often, these tropes are decontextualized—they’re just “out there” in everyday stories, popular media, online, without clear links between what supports and results from teacher action (e.g., material conditions and ethical consequences)—and reproduce stories about ways of being that are not instantiated in concrete ways of doing beyond single snapshot moments. Newcomers remember that

John Keating inspired his students; no one mentions the suicide ending. Or Nigel, for

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instance, remembers the teacher in the newspaper, who “had the welts to show for” her sacrifice, without knowing the outcome for the teacher or the students. Perhaps most problematically, others’ stories about teachers do not actually illustrate how either teaching or learning works, both in and over time. Instead, at best, they illuminate flashpoint moments of sacrifice or storylines that align with “the cult of personality”; or at worst, they reflect a generalized lack of understanding, or even fear, of historically inherited, unresolved political binaries. Any set of slotted, binary positions are not only inaccurate to new teachers’ lived experiences; they are also damaging weight to carry forward as newcomers imagine better projective identities for themselves as teachers and learners in our field and our profession.

The second challenge is that, along with their own experiences, the public and pop culture narratives that newcomers remember might combine to form some sort of

“accidental apprenticeship” in teaching—but one that is too narrow if it only focuses on the sedimented dual roles of Student and Teacher performing academic work in the classroom. Such a patchwork apprenticeship is, first of all, largely imbalanced (more years in K12 than post-secondary) and uneven, not mapping directly or smoothly onto college writing teaching since graduate students in English do not enter graduate school with a lifetime’s worth of exposure to college composition pedagogy. At best, they have a semester’s worth of first-year writing, though many (including me) were exempted from the requirement because they were previously marked as “good writers.” Perhaps even more importantly, newcomers’ teaching identities are influenced by more than the dual apprenticeships that Ritchie and Wilson identify—accidental (as a student) and deliberate

(as a teacher in “training”) (30)—because they are complex individuals who occupy more

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than dual positions as Students and Teachers. They have also, by virtue of membership in multiple cultures, experienced a wider network of narratives about the value and practices of education that come from stories within and beyond the classroom. We would be wise, as a field, to attune to this wider network in our own “scripting” of new teachers, in ways that we cannot trace if we focus new teacher research only on authorized sites of teacher training, rather than on the trajectories and domains of activity that influence who newcomers are and who they want to become as teachers over time, as evidenced in

Nigel’s stories above.

The last challenge is to our own human and perhaps, too, academic inclination to focus on what experiences do not work for new teachers or what aspects of their identities or self-understandings seem limiting or hindering rather than on generative experiences that do inform and shape their teaching. I assume we do this for two reasons: because what doesn’t work is most immediately and prominently visible, and because we want to support people in places and moments of struggle. And yet. To do so by assuming, projecting, and proleptically calling newcomers into positions of deficit and lack (or calling newcomers to recognize themselves in these roles) is not a good enough or generative enough disciplinary narrative—though it is certainly one we have learned to tell well. It is not enough to assume or look primarily for and at moments in which

“teachers’ identities and practices…subvert their real potential to develop as teachers, diminishing their authority and undermining potentially powerful conceptions of teaching, literacy, and selfhood” (Ritchie and Wilson 19), rather than looking—with intent (as Ratcliffe suggests we must, in order to practice rhetorical listening) for ways in which new teachers’ identities are learned and developed in relation to potentially

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generative complex educational histories and scripts of/for learning. Unfortunately, a limiting scholarly view on newcomers is an obstacle that we have historically inherited and that sets us up for a conversion model in which we as experienced scholar-teachers and WPAs can be too easily poised to step into the transformative Hero role and “right the wrongs” of new teachers’ educational pasts—in ways that we would be wise to watch for, interrogate, and re-story.

While these challenges are persistent, we can learn to tell stories from a different stance, and there are myriad hopes for the future and multiple ways to re-story ourselves as researchers and teachers dedicated to newcomer support and enculturation. One hope is a generative research focus on new teacher identity learning, as revealed in Nigel’s and others’ stories. As a group, the five new teachers in my study remember, enact, and imagine teacher roles that are far more complex than any simple media depiction or political strawman. They tell their own stories, rich with detail, about building relationships with other people and with knowledge-making, drawing on and desiring far better scripts than previous models of the Authoritarian, the transformative Hero, or the scapegoated Villain—despite that some persistent scholarly narrative grooves suggest new teachers have few experiences to theorize from or bring in limited/ing experiences and identities. Nigel still has his Raymond Carver book, not because J.A. stood on a desk or took his class on a haunting tour of any Victorian-era trophy hall; instead, he asked questions about white foods and countries that started with “I,” which unlocked a moment of intrigue for Nigel that he took up and transformed into a telling moment in his own trajectory. And remember the two new teachers’ from the epigraph: Penny and

Violet. In her story of a good teacher (shared in Chapter Two), Penny does not remember

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anything her fifth grade teacher said to her specifically, but that she sat down with her and talked about her writing in a way that makes her still to this day remember being heard and valued; no powerful Authoritarian figure calling the shots or saving the day, though perhaps the act of listening and taking time are among the “radical student- centered models” that Penny mentions in the epigraph. But she doesn’t have to see her own experiences that way to mark them as meaningful or memorable, or to enact them in her own classroom—because perhaps the weight of the “radical” Hero figure is too much and is now troubled for Penny (another casualty of the 2016 Presidential election).

Similarly, Violet, whom I imagine would eschew the model of the transformative Hero, does not recall any “grand moments” she mentions in the epigraph in relation to teachers she is grateful for or the one she wants to become. In Violet’s stories, the “good teacher” is the one who models being comfortable with herself, in and outside of the classroom, in acknowledgement that teachers (and scholars) are human beings who bring their own rich identities in ways that destabilize the boundaries between Teacher and Student, or knowledge-holder and knowledge-receiver, and connect on a human level. As a field, we can benefit from studies and practices that underscore rather than elide teachers’ human relationships with students, other teachers, and those beyond the classroom; and we could do so in ways that include but transcend a tight focus on what Restaino marks as the

“fraught task of knowledge-making in composition” (113) so that we can develop a more capacious understanding of the relationships between people and writing and the institutional and educational relationships at work in the college writing classroom.

Another hope emerges in the disciplinary possibilities of focusing not just on authorized sites of teacher training or within synchronic storied moments, but on identity

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learning and development across domains and over time. The roles present in new teachers’ stories about themselves as remembered, experienced, and desired, emerge from identities learned over time, not just in the time-space of institutional training but via student-teacher interactions in schools and at work. Nigel’s stories show how he has experienced memorable scripts of/for learning by tutoring, via bad high school student experiences and two-year college classroom questions, and through his own interactions with students in his courses, which will continue to mediate and motivate his identity learning over time. From students’ learning spaces and body modification images, to their lists of “what they should know” as students and writers at a four-year metropolitan university. From the monotony of Nigel’s high school computer lab check list, to the

“figure it out” rhetorical approach of his later undergraduate career. And from Nigel’s own experiences with newspaper editing, teaching sailing, and community theater, to his imagined future in a first-year experience course discussing Kanye West as a public intellectual. The other “newest of the new” teachers, Simone, also shared memorable stories, which reveal the relationship between Assessor and Encourager that she remembered from high school, worked through in her own classroom, and hoped to enact in the future. Simone’s other stories tell of her own “180” transformation from being distrustful of technology in any English classroom to being a vocal proponent of digital composing in the college writing classroom, with excited glimpses into how she might leverage her composition teaching experience and put it to work in the creative writing classroom she would like to teach one day. As a field, we ask many questions that might elicit such stories from newcomers; we can always do a better job of listening to them and modeling for new teachers how to rhetorically listen for our own stories rather than

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reduce narrative to a representation of others’ past experience in new teacher training (a danger in Anson, Jolliffe, and Shapiro’s “Stories to Teach By: Using Narrative Cases in

TA and Faculty Development”) or relegate it to a “personal” writing strategy (a risk in

Juzwik et al.’s “Re-thinking Personal Narrative in the Pedagogy of Writing Teacher

Preparation”; cf Journet, “Narrative Turns”).

Last, those moments, memories, and stories of Nigel’s and other new teachers in my study also reveal the scripts we most need to make visible: those that tell us how new teachers think people actually learn best, including themselves and the students in their courses. Simone’s implicit connection between encouragement and assessment is not only telling of her own learning; it also shows how she thinks learning works, with particular attention to institutional contexts and requirements, yes, but more importantly to affect and relationship-building in the classroom. Similarly, Nigel’s dedication to

Questioning and Violet’s dedication to Experimentation (in Chapter Five) are telling of both how they have learned best as individuals and also how they think and hope their students will learn, too. Participants’ stories in my study do not simply fall in line with the adage, “we teach how we’re taught,” which assumes both a singular teaching method from someone’s 13 to 18 years of education and a lack of reflection on a rather straightforward transfer model (Latterell; Wilhoit; Goleman). Based on the stories and methods of analysis in this chapter, a more accurate adage for my participants would be

“we hope to teach based on how we learned best,” assuming instead that even new teachers are experienced Learners who know they did not learn equally well from all teachers and teaching methods. Newcomers act on models they have tacitly internalized—in ways that are not always limiting, but can also be quite empowering.

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While direct evidence from participants’ own classrooms or of their students’ learning is outside the scope of my study, I assume these five new teachers often stumble, performing their desired roles and identities unevenly in and over time—as we all do. Yet rather than look disproportionately at the low moments, in which newcomers are marked as not performing the way a “good” writing teacher “should” (according to “us”), we should also actively work to illuminate moments when newcomers are learning and could use our support, encouragement, rhetorical listening, and moments for reflection just the same. By encouraging new teachers to work toward and reflect on productive models of learning, rooted in their own understandings and experiences, as a field we could further enact what we claim to know about learning: that it does not always happen in direct correlation with teaching (Wenger 3), does not only occur the time-space of the semester and classroom, and is visible when we look for it—with intent—rather than looking—for intent—at its alternative.

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CHAPTER FOUR

TELLING TROUBLES: AGENCY AND AFFECT IN NEW WRITING TEACHERS’

“STORIES TO SHARE”

“...it went horribly [discussion about catcalling]. It was awful... and I was like, ‘well, shit—it’s like—I can’t—it’s done.’” [laughs] –Penny

“Anything I was throwing at them [about body image], it just wasn’t working.” – James

“The conversation [about rape culture] is often disappointing and very focused on like ‘why is everybody being so mean to the men.’” –Violet

“You learn to swim, you know, sometimes by being just thrown in. And sometimes you learn to drown that way, too.” [laughs] –Nigel

Multiple participant stories reveal themes that might underlie many teachers’

“horror stories”: an unexpected loss of control, a sense of being a bystander within a scene we believe we have contributed to creating, uncertain about who is responsible and how we might have recouped to make something intentionally meaningful before our 50- minute class ended. These themes are perhaps exacerbated for newcomers by the rather sinking feeling that the bulk of their time and energy in learning to teach for the first time is spent not on thriving but on surviving—the day, week, term—when, time and again, just a moment before, they thought perhaps they had finally learned not just to keep their heads above water but actually how to swim.

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As I underscored in Chapter One, the stories we have learned to tell—of new writing teachers’ resistance and deficit—can work together over time to create, sediment, and reproduce a narrative history of positions of relative powerlessness for newcomers.

As a field, we need to actively promote more empowering (dis)positions for newcomers, to encourage people to inhabit and enact teaching writing as a desired professional identity and see teaching as a positionality of possibility beyond (but not blind to) the oft- told stories of endless labor, bitter disappointment, and abject victimization (e.g., Miller;

Micciche). Such stories do not contribute enough to ways of seeing how new teachers are learning: not just skills or methods but identities that are both constraining and enabling

(as explored in Chapter Three). If we take as a given that newcomers are learning and need support in that learning process—rather than leading (however unintentionally) with what new teachers lack that we have pre-identified as a field in the history of new teacher research and scholarship—how might that change how we approach this question: What support do new writing teachers need right now? The answer to this question will be, of course, situated in specific institutions, programs, and writing classrooms. But more important than any specific answer is the question itself—and the assumption I take as a given: that newcomers need support but may not be able to articulate specific needs for many reasons. When so much is new, it is difficult to know, in any single moment, what is working and what is not. Moreover, articulating help is no easy task within institutional

(and popular) cultures that value mastery and knowing and often vilify needing or asking for help, coding individuals as “weak” or as “novices” with insufficient constructs (as in

Dryer’s “At a Mirror Darkly”) or as “victims” in need of rescuing (as in Restaino’s First

Semester, 52). And finally, both of the above scenarios are further complicated when the

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researcher eliciting responses from newcomers is often a more experienced teacher- scholar and/or administrator who has a position of (in)vested power within the local writing/graduate program.

For these reasons, I did not ask participants to identify a “teaching fail” or to take a stance on any official structure of support (i.e., the practicum, mentoring, professional development)—both of which would have leant themselves more likely to certain

narrative positions of deficit or the awkward Table 5 Stories to Share Interview construction of speaking back to someone in a Questions 1. If you were going to share a position of program authority. Instead, I asked the story from your own teaching experience with five new writing teachers in my study: what someone who was going to be teaching writing for the stories might you share with someone who was first time, what would you tell them? Why? about to teach writing for the first time? (see 2. Is there a “bad experience” story that you might tell a Table 5). This is a notable construction because it new writing teacher for a particular reason? Why? opens a space for stories (and perhaps, too, for 3. Could you tell me about a story from your own participants) to breathe (see Arthur Frank’s Letting teaching that you might not want to share with a new Stories Breathe) and because many new teacher writing teacher? Why?

research studies include answers in their Each of these questions from the first interview round was questions, directing responses in a targeted way then repeated, in this order, in the second interview round, based on embedded assumptions visible with the added focus on “a story about using digital media in the linguistically in the questions themselves.35 While writing classroom.”

35 For example, “do you feel unprepared…” (Restaino 126), or “I’d like to ask you about the congruencies or disjunctures that you’ve experienced…” (Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly” 445). This is not to say that my interview questions avoided evaluative language or setting up certain kinds of responses, which are unavoidable linguistic and research issues; but that I was careful to qualify the kinds of stories I hoped to hear while leaving open what those stories were about or how they were retold to me. 150

my interview questions are not exempt from critique and are not free from evaluative language or subjective leanings, my goal was to open up space for stories about teaching and schooling not guided by any other particular topic (writing, grading, labor, process, assessment, and so on) and to let new teachers’ stories “breathe” from there. 36 The five participants in my study were willing and open to sharing embarrassments and uncertainties in addition to advice and successful strategies, and their reasons for wanting to share with other newcomers were just as telling and compelling as the stories themselves: to expose the limits of individual expertise, to suggest a strategy for getting to know students, to illustrate that impact on students takes time and is uneven, to offer advice about pedagogical stance and the importance of peer socialization, to assure others that they will make mistakes and have days that feel out of control or uncomfortable. As a larger project, my dissertation asks: how might we analyze newcomers’ stories to reveal moments of identity learning, rather than only moments of deficit or resistance? This chapter asks: if we do not assume to know pre-identified problems new teachers may face in their own identity learning, what stories might we hear instead? How might we listen for, rather than occlude, them in our program research on new teachers?

This chapter, then, illuminates new teachers’ identity learning by examining their storied retellings of self-identified troubles in the writing classroom—as previewed in the opening quotations. The familiar tensions in these newcomers’ teaching stories—a class

36 I do acknowledge that two of my three questions have a rather predetermined tone, marked by “bad” experience or something “not” to share. I asked the “bad” experience question because I suspected that the unmarked “story to share” question would elicit more positive responses of generally stable narratives, things that went well for clearly articulated reasons; and this was generally the case in participants’ responses. I asked the “not to share” question to inquire beyond stories that perhaps participants had told previously or repeatedly, or had already shared, in order to elicit stories other than the ones that, even as new teachers, they may have already repeated and/or internalized. 151

that went “horribly,” our pedagogical strategies “not working,” “disappointing” discussions, suddenly feeling as if we are drowning rather than learning to swim—are so pervasive and taken as “givens” by experienced teachers that we might not even see them as “reportable.” Yet they are particularly important to unpack for two reasons. First, to

“stand under” identity learning for newcomers, we need to see and unpack their teaching practices before those practices—and the professional identity storying that accompanies them—become habitual and tacit. This is particularly important not just because newcomers are ripe for growth and change; but also because closely studying newcomers allows those of us with more experience to see and listen for what we may have long ago internalized as educators. Second, making the familiar strange also allows us to study and make visible the process of becoming, of identities as they are being learned and storied in moments of dynamic feeling for newcomers who are experiencing these stories via living and again in retelling in/through stories that are, for them, quite reportable— directed, in these cases, to the imagined audience of other new teachers. In other words, studying newcomer stories is one way for us to see (1) what we have, in some sense, already accomplished and internalized and (2) the process of becoming that we no longer have access to in the same way. In Writing/Disciplinarity, Paul Prior writes:

Disciplinary enculturation then refers not to novices being initiated, but to

the continual processes whereby an ambiguous cast of relative newcomers

and relative old-timers (re)produce themselves, their practices, and their

communities. These images of participation in disciplinary practices point

to doing things rather than having something or being someplace; they

suggest process views of disciplines. (xii)

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If enculturation is a co-participatory process of newcomers and old-timers alike, then newcomer stories offer valuable insight from a position that more experienced teacher- scholars can only remember from a substantively distanced position (temporally, institutionally, geographically, affectively) but that can help us to perform and improve both new teacher administrative and teaching support and new teacher research.

This chapter, then, illuminates new teachers’ identity learning by examining their storied retellings of self-identified troubles in the writing classroom that newcomers would share, from their temporally and affectively situated position, with other new teachers—as previewed in the opening quotations. First, I introduce multiple frameworks for studying important issues of agency and affect, “standing under” new writing teachers’ stories to share to listen rhetorically—both thematically and structurally—to/for what support they might need: namely, by examining narrative troubles, trajectories, and turning points. I then share specific coding methods for analyzing newcomer stories thematically (i.e., troubles) and structurally (i.e., trajectories and turning points), followed by an overview of my findings with two particular points of interest. The first is that new teachers’ retelling of lived and remembered classroom experiences illuminates more complex thematic issues of action than powerlessness for newcomers. The second is that new teachers’ “bad experiences” to share stories are especially structurally rich with turning points often on a progressive narrative trajectory, which illuminates more complex issues of affect than deep-rooted resistance or victimhood. Based on these salient findings, I then analyze in-depth one “bad experience” story from Penny’s first year of teaching. In this chapter, narrative serves as one means of revealing self-identified new teacher troubles on multiple levels—thematic and structural (narrative as well as

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linguistic)—thereby illuminating new teacher identity learning and contributing to conversations about newcomers’ own experienced and narrated configurations of agency and affect over time, which we need to focus on in order to encourage more empowering

(dis)positions for newcomers in our field.

The stories in this chapter reveal individual teacher needs and perceptions based on thematic and structural narrative analysis, with several implications for disciplinary teacher education practices and for qualitative narrative research. First, structurally, participants’ stories of bad experiences to share often proceed along progressive narrative arcs replete with rich turning points and various resources marked as present and absent; and thematically, all participants had at least one story (from this “stories to share” subset, though certainly others, too) that was rooted in difficulties of talking with students in large group discussion—often complicated by sexist talk and thinking in the writing classroom. Participants’ stories reveal not striking deficits or marked resistance, but rich layers of both recruiting and relying on resources that influence how new writing teachers act and feel (or not). Further—when asked for any story to share, rather than a pre- selected specific topic—participants’ actions and feelings are often narrated in relation to invoked troubles that are notably absent in new teacher preparation scholarship. For instance, despite the explicit repeated presence of “new writing teachers” as a collocational phrase in my interview questions and conversations (both on and off the record), participants tell many stories to share in which writing is not the primary agent, written communication is not the foregrounded topic, and troubles have very little to do with common areas of emphasis in writing instruction scholarship (e.g., writing process, invention, responding to and assessing student writing). Instead, troubles in newcomer

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stories to share often have to do with spoken face-to-face interaction with students either one-on-one or during large group classroom meetings, what educational researchers call teacher talk (Dyson; Juzwik, Inspiring Dialogue). Though it is an elided area of inquiry in new teacher research in writing studies, teacher talk is salient in multiple participant stories from my study in relation to the subject of classroom discussion: sexist thought, speech, and action in ways that might appear (and baffle us) in student writing but that also complicate and are adumbrated in face-to-face class discussion. When new teacher research subordinates teacher talk, however unintentionally, it conflicts with a theoretical understanding that we often endorse as a field but do not enact thoroughly in our studying of, and practices for enculturating, new writing teachers: that writing is a highly situated, diversely mediated social activity that entails both talk and text and relationships between them (Leander and Prior, “Speaking and Writing”; Bazerman and Prior). This same understanding also applies to teaching writing as a complex profession, whose object and means of instruction are not accomplished in and through writing “alone.”

Troubles, Trajectories, Turning Points: Tracing Agency and Affect in Newcomers’

Stories

It is my assumption undergirding this chapter that circulating narratives of deficit are a problem not just of action or agency, but also of feeling or affect. I draw on a rather distilled definition of agency as the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn 112) and of an agent as one who engages “in the exercise of power…to bring about effects and to (re)constitute the world” (Ahearn 113).37 In other words, agency is the ability to

37 While the definition of agent, which I use throughout this chapter, comes from Laura M. Ahearn’s “Language and Agency,” she has borrowed the distinction between actor and agent 155

exercise socioculturally mediated power in specific instances where power exercised brings about action. As such, agency is about not just who is doing what, but also how and why, which involves embodied action in configurations of thinking and doing that cannot phenomenologically be decontextualized from being and feeling.38 Based on my research—and experience listening to and telling stories alongside teachers at the secondary and postsecondary levels—I understand that narratives of deficit do not just tell people what they are perceived to lack; internalized in any small measure, they also shape how people feel about their ability to act (or not), which in turn influences both future action and projective identities (see Gee Chapter 7). This section details the multiple frameworks present in this chapter for examining the complex relationships between action and feeling, as they are storied over time and retold in participants’ own teaching stories.

To discuss agency and action from a narrative perspective, I begin by borrowing

Jerome Bruner’s conception of “Trouble” as a terministic screen borrowed from Burke and complicated by now-accepted understandings of realities as multiple, dynamic, and continually renegotiated. Bruner has spent a long, illustrious career characterizing narrative as a means of understanding the world and making sense and order out of otherwise chaotic experience (Acts of Meaning, Actual Minds, “Self-Making,” “The

from Ivan Karp’s “Agency and Social Theory: A Review of Anthony Giddens” (137). Agent is defined in-text; an actor, by contrast, is one whose “action is rule governed or oriented” (Karp 137). 38 I would argue that new teacher research, and our field as a whole, have longer histories of studying thinking and doing (in our academic focus on epistemologies and our administrative and research focus on practices and actions) than we do of foregrounding being and feeling. Others before me have argued the same about the natural and social sciences as well as the humanities (Wetherell and Bruner, e.g.), and many seem to be using the collocational phrase human sciences to break down not just siloed boundaries between field but also our understandings of embodied human behavior and situated motivation. 156

Narrative Construction,” “The ‘Remembered’ Self”). In Acts of Meaning, he posits that the function of story is to make sense of deviations from or violations of canonical cultural patterns (49-50). Unsurprisingly, he suggests then that Trouble—any “breached norm”—is the “engine” of narrative, is “at the hub of narrative realities,” is the impetus for stories “worth” telling and interpreting (Bruner, The Culture of Education, 142). In

Acts of Meaning, Bruner defines Trouble specifically as an imbalance between any of

Burke’s five pentadic elements: Actor, Action, Goal, Scene, Instrument (50). He gives specific examples, such as “Action toward a Goal is inappropriate in a particular Scene,”

“an Actor does not fit the Scene,” “dual Scene,” or “confusion of Goals” (Bruner, Acts of

Meaning, 50). However, this relatively straightforward characterization of Trouble is, of course, as complex as Kenneth Burke’s pentad itself (act, scene, agent, agency, purpose).

Trouble, norms, and plotlines are neither given nor static; we construct them internally in relation to our interpretations of cultural norms, scripts, or templates. Thus, a central

Narrative Trouble is identifying and characterizing what counts as Trouble and why

(Bruner, The Culture of Education, 142). This complication of Burke’s “epistemically thin” pentad in what Bruner calls “the age of skepticism” is, by another name, the postmodern poststructuralist paradigm that we are always already embedded within multiple constructed, situated realities, in which we are “gripped not just by ‘what happens’ but by the puzzle of how in a turbulent world we come to know or to construct our realities. ‘Troubles’ now inhere not only in a mismatch between a protagonist and her setting, but also in a protagonist’s internal struggle in construing that setting at all” (The

Culture of Education, 142).

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I want to pause here to supplement Bruner’s characterization of Trouble with my own assumptions, not as a “skeptic” but as a believer in several core tenets of postmodern, poststructuralist, queer, and feminist perspectives that further complicate— in needed ways—Bruner’s points in his brief construction of Trouble. First, I would not describe the above view as skeptical; it is phenomenological. We experience the world not as predetermined fabula; there are few clearly marked turning points (beyond the constructed schooling timeline of childhood) and often no resolution (not even one that is ambiguous). We are consistently tasked with making meaning of our lives in “puzzled”

(and puzzling) ways that exceed historical conceptions of narrative as a means of ordering lived experience by establishing firm causality and constructing personal and social coherence in ways that make rational sense.39 In “The Dialogics of Narrative

Identity,” Jennifer De Peuter explicates how traditional narrative theory is wedded to coherence and causality, a view that still shapes how we think of and conceptualize narrative as organized around a stable core self rather than as a means of interpreting both centripetal and centrifugal forces at work in the interplay between narrative and identity.

De Peuter advocates for the latter, a far more dialogic model of dispersion and disarray that neither excludes nor privileges narrative as a means of “ordering” experience, but argues that we often espouse this view theoretically even when we do not enact it in our research. While De Peuter was writing in the late 1990s, I would argue that we have this continued challenge still today due to these inherited epistemologies and the research practices and published genres we use, which by their nature temporally crystallize and spatially decontexualize dynamic processes of being and becoming. Second, another

39 De Peuter extensively reviews these conceptions in her chapter in Bakhtin and the Human Sciences: No Last Words. 158

perhaps less negatively connotative word for “turbulence” is change. If we take change as a given rather than as a part of our “setting” to resist, the notion of a “mismatch” between self and setting loses some of its hermeneutic and heuristic power. Last, our “internal struggle” is both to interpret a setting/world and ourselves and ourselves in relation to that world, in a more complex three-part recursive relationship that Bruner and other narrative scholars acknowledge elsewhere but that doesn’t get much attention in his brief synopsis of Trouble. If we assume change as a given, discard the goal of “matching” ourselves to the world, and see our task as making slippery and temporary sense of ourselves, our worlds, and the shifting relationships between the two—then we may assume Troubles are always multiple, messy, and on the move.

In this chapter, Troubles are structural as well as thematic, happening not only in the moments of living and remembering but also in new teachers’ retelling of the stories in which they experienced moments of Trouble or imbalance within the writing classroom.40 Therefore, this chapter conducts structural as well as thematic analysis of newcomers’ stories to share, examining what social psychologists and narrative theorists

Kenneth J. Gergen and Mary M. Gergen identify as three basic narrative trajectories that capture how a story unfolds over time: those in which the narrative remains essentially unchanged (stable), is continually “improving” (progressive), or is continually

“declining” (regressive) (258). Trajectories matter in narrative research—and in my

40 To clarify my use of the term retelling, Clandinin distinguishes between several narrative terms: living out of stories is phenomenological (living—that’s what we do); telling stories about those experiences is hermeneutic in less artificial ways than an interview (i.e., the stories we tell ourselves and others about what happened, whose tellings emerge in social interaction); retelling is the telling of stories when a narrative researcher comes alongside you as an audience and participates in the research, narrative, and interpretive processes; and reliving is the ideal wherein retelling has some effect on participants’ lives moving forward. 159

study—because identifying an arc, as Gergen and Gergen note, is one way to move past synchronic moments and mechanistic assumptions of self (as affected by external inputs in single moments) and consider instead narrative as an “active construction of personal history” in ways that are reflexive and diachronic and that hope to reveal the complex actions and feelings involved in the process of becoming (255). This is especially important for studying identities, too, because if narrative is a “fundamental means of generating coherence and direction over time” (Gergen and Gergen 258), then self- narratives are ways to elicit and trace an “individual’s account of the relationships among self-relevant events across time” rather than “seeing one’s life as simply ‘one damned thing after another’” (Gergen and Gergen 255) without the sense- or meaning-making that narrative can operationalize. For my purposes here, I assume the process of newcomers becoming teachers is still in motion (and I will complicate the seemingly discrete tripartite set-up of these trajectories later in this chapter).

Not only do stories often contain multiple, interrelated trajectories; they also contain multiple turning points within those trajectories. In “Self-Making and World-

Making,” Bruner suggests that a turning point marks an episode in which a narrator attributes change in a protagonist’s story to a belief, a conviction, or a thought (73). The self-“marking” of turning points in any narrative highlights that the narrated change should not be taken as a given but as something reportable and as a moment that sits in relation to a recognized Trouble (Bruner, “Self-Making” 73). Bruner also notes that the marking of turning points is a “device further to distinguish what is ordinary and expectable from that which is idiosyncratic and quintessentially agentive” (“Self-

Making” 73) (cf Addison). As such, turning points are one intersection between narrative

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and agency that shows other interlocutors what agentive acts are reportable in stories. In written autobiography, a turning point marks an episode in which a narrator attributes change in a protagonist’s story to a belief, a conviction, or a thought; its purpose is to recognize Trouble and highlight the narrated change as “reportable” rather than

“expectable,” as “quintessentially agentive” (Bruner, “Self-Making” 73). Since oral stories elicited via interviews are not generically or rhetorically identical to written autobiography, for my purposes here I do not assume that any one teaching story from my corpus is a turning point; instead, I am more interested in looking at linguistic turning points within a “single” teaching story, or episode, in (and through) which a speaker attributes change to a thought or belief that highlights and recognizes Troubles, or breached norms, that are omnipresent in our educational structures.

Examining troubles, trajectories, and turning points illuminates a nexus of complex relationships between narrative, action, and feeling. When participants narrate agents’ “exercise of power…to bring about effects and to (re)constitute the world”

(Ahearn 113)—or not—their language and narrative structure also tell the story of how they feel in relation to issues of agency and power, action and inaction, their or others’ ability to bring about desired change. If being an agent in the world is about action and power, then stories from newcomers—rooted in their temporal and affective positions of novicehood, often constructed in scholarly narratives as powerless—reveal moments of vulnerability that stick with them in memory and to them in affective practice. Social psychologist Margaret Wetherell defines affect as “embodied meaning-making” or, quite simply, “human emotion” (4). In Affect and Emotion, Wetherell suggests that the affective turn in social sciences “leads to a focus on embodiment, to attempts to

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understand how people are moved…” (2), to narrowing attention to focus on “becoming, potential and the virtual” (3)—which I take up in this chapter specifically in relation to newcomers who are working through teaching as part of their professional identities for the first time. Her arguments about the importance of emotion are certainly not new, but her theorization of how emotions build up and relate to future actions and identities is far more granular than, for instance, Bruner’s brief mention of emotion in Actual Minds,

Possible Worlds: “Emotion is not usefully isolated from the knowledge of the situation that arouses it. Cognition is not a form of pure knowing to which emotion is added…

And action is a final common path based on what one knows and feels” (117-18). In part to explicate complex relationships between action and feeling, Wetherell coins the term

“affective practices,” which she defines as dynamic, multiple, divergent, and mobile (13), sometimes “densely knotted in with social practices where the degree of knitting reinforces the affect and can make it resistant and durable, sometimes unbearably so”

(14). After working with new college writing teachers as a peer, mentor, and administrator, I find Wetherell’s loaded terms—resistant, durable, unbearable— particularly poignant when I think of new teachers who are already overloaded graduate students, whom Jessica Restaino suggests often experience a “sink-or-swim laboring experience” (33), with extreme efforts merely “to survive, to stay afloat” (24) during their first semester. The (dis)position of quiet (or perhaps not so quiet) panic is easy for new writing teachers to occupy amid “isolated chaos” (Restaino 24) when they feel quite keenly that—perhaps like the WPAs who teach and supervise them—they have been given tasks they cannot successfully accomplish given the institutional demands on their

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bodies, minds, and time. Like WPAs, graduate student teachers do not just act but also feel (dis)positions of powerlessness, “densely knotted,” perhaps “unbearably so.”

I pause here to ruminate on Wetherell’s notion of affect, or the still rather amorphous term affective practices, as “densely knotted”—“sometimes unbearably so”— because what Bruner and his contemporaries offered through cognitive psychology,

Wetherell deepens through social psychology and linguistics in ways that are salient when combined with my preferred definition of identities from anthropology and education and this chapter’s methods of narrative research. Holland et al. characterize identities as self-understandings of who we tell ourselves we are that resonate with us, that we produce using available cultural resources, that are productions of past and present action that influence future action, and that are accomplished in and through social activity. My interests in this chapter—in how storytelling reveals configurations of agency that are about feeling as well as action—are interconnected with Holland et al.’s characterization. We (re)produce identities using available cultural resources, yes; we also story our identities based on retelling understandings that resonate with us. Though

“resonate” is not a word that Bruner or other narrative scholars rely on, it captures for me, in a single word, the phenomenological experience of emotion and cognition as simultaneously occurring, narrativized ways of making meaning from everyday experience—and retelling that process of meaning-making in and through story.

However, there is also of course danger in assuming that emotion is easily indexed in participants’ stories and language use. On the surface, drawing thematic conclusions about affect via interview responses is predicated upon honesty in self- reporting, which is itself based on tenuous assumptions that we can honestly articulate

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how we feel at any given moment—and will do so in the presence of the researcher.

Beneath the surface of self-reported responses, linguists have historically used markers that might guide us to conclusions about affect (see Hyland41) that are still highly subjective (who decides what counts as “ambivalence”?( (cf Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”

429) and easily misinterpreted based on our own biased histories and assumptions of language use (Schiffrin, “Discourse Markers”; Holmes, “Function of You Know in

Women’s and Men’s Speech”; and Lakoff’s oft-disputed and refuted, Language and

Woman’s Place). Given these methodological difficulties and the entrenched narrative groove of powerlessness and despondency in new teacher research, I have approached affect with caution in the following analysis, especially in light of my own bias and beliefs. I have a vested interest in seeing possibilities beyond writing teachers as victims or converts, novices as not-knowers or combatants. Further, I believe that stories have power to shape what we do and how we feel in ways that change who we understand ourselves to be. Together, these points have allowed me to explore some of the myriad human emotions regarding educational and workplace scenarios not as they “objectively happened” but as they are remembered and retold by participants, and to use available elements of stories as one generative way of looking at configurations of agency in newcomers’ retellings of stories that have the potential to help us all re-story our understandings of new teacher identity learning.

Such complex configurations, revealed in and through story trajectories and turning points, allow us to see the process of becoming via shifting self-understandings of

41 In “Talking to Students,” Ken Hyland describes linguistic markers (see table on p. 7) often used to analyze academic writing (e.g., hedges, code glosses, transitional metadiscourse) that have also been used in recent new teacher research (Dryer, “Who Should Get the TAship? Toward Predictive Validity in Awarding Assistantships”). 164

action and feeling over time that precede the interview and exceed the bounds of a single semester or course. In other words, stories allow us to see and study newcomer identities as they are learned and storied over time and, in doing so, can also help us all remember what it is like to experience teaching Troubles in the beginning of our careers and, in doing so, to (re)consider the support we might offer new teachers, helping them learn to tell stories of teaching as an agentive (dis)positionality of possibility—both about and for newcomers—rather than reproducing more research within inherited grooves of deficit and powerlessness. This chapter advances narrative as a methodology for studying such complex configurations, which is needed for two reasons. First, participants’ stories illuminate this internal inconsistency in enacting theory and the related gap in new teacher research and preparation. Second, those same newcomer stories shine on a light on what else is happening in the gap that we otherwise may not see and, therefore, in our support of new teachers, are more likely to further occlude rather than address. The results I share here are not the only ones, are not validated through statistical significance of qualitative data narratively elicited or coded; they show us possibilities for what narrative research has illuminated in my project: turning points, trajectories, and other linguistic “tells” during retellings of Troubles that reveal issues of action and feeling otherwise occluded that are deeply relevant to new teacher identity learning.

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One Way to Read for/in/around Support: Agency and Affect in Stories to Share

In this section, I explicate specific methods for studying questions poised at the intersections of agency, affect, and narrative (see Table 6): coding for troubles, trajectories, and turning points in order to consider newcomers’ self-identified struggles and how we might support them as new teachers. First, looking for/at resources is one way to construct a thematic conversation about action because drawing on resources is a generative act, as is retelling remembered acts of recruiting and needing available resources. When newcomers mark certain actions as available, preferred, possible, or desirable, we can see Ahearn’s characterization of agency—as the socioculturally mediated capacity to act (112)—made visible in storytelling, wherein an agent is a

“person engaged in the exercise of power in the sense of the ability to bring about effects and to (re)constitute the world” (113). I also chose to focus on recruiting and relying on resources, out of many available teacher actions, based on my own experiences of felt frustrations in our program, which on the surface had less to do with academic writing tensions and more to do with clear communication of available resources and/or

resources simply not available (whether at the Table 6 Research Questions for program, department, or institutional levels). My Coding Chapter Four

1. What resources (people, experiences were individual (as a teacher in our tools, program offerings) do new teachers suggest that program) and administrative (as a new teacher they draw on—and that they still need? mentor and workshop facilitator), and many of my 2. What kinds of stories would new writing teachers share assumptions were based on my own research with other new teachers? experience from my prior year’s pilot interview

study of 10 instructors across our program (tenure-

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track faculty, term faculty, graduate students, and part-time lecturers) regarding digital media and composition pedagogy. Further, I wanted to see new teachers as both knowing and needing resources to support student learning in their courses; rather than focusing on one or the other, I assumed newcomers had activated some prior knowledge not just of writing or necessarily of teaching (as Ritchie and Wilson assume in their concept of

“accidental apprenticeship”) but also of how to go about posing and solving problems in unfamiliar situations. For my first round of coding then, I lump coded42 for resources that

I saw in each story as a single unit, marking resources that participants used and needed.

As I coded for resources, I subcoded (Saldaña, 91-94) for the type of resource (e.g., human, digital tool, program offering), for the source of that resource (e.g., institution, program, department, discipline, individual), and for whether or not the participant had used the resource or needed it (with much overlap in these categories, as is common in lump coding and when subcoding for multiple points at once). This gave me a snapshot overview that, in narrative terms, would be considered thematic analysis (Riessman,

Chapter Three) and that I used in part to guide my selection of stories for further analysis.

Moving beyond thematic content, examining what kinds of stories new teachers would share with other newcomers reveals structural occurrences in participants’ teaching stories in order to illuminate identity learning not visible in thematic analysis alone. Participants’ narrative trajectories across single stories, questions, and cases (rather than only in synchronic moments within a story) can help us see through, push past, and question not just what narrative tropes or overdetermined trajectories are present in any story, but how they are experienced by newcomers in the moment of their living as well

42 See Saldaña 23-24 for more granular distinctions between lump and split coding. 167

as retelling. To work toward this structural analysis, I lump coded each story for its narrative trajectory: for example, “individual willing to take a risk receives great reward,” and the slightly less abstracted “newcomer takes a risk with a new practice and feels good when it is well received by others” or “new teacher takes a risk with a new activity and is delighted when it is well received by students.”43 Those shorthand descriptions allowed me to acknowledge the presence of tropes while also labeling the directionality of the narrative arc for further analysis using Gergen and Gergen’s three trajectories (stable, progressive, regressive) (258). To further work toward structural analysis, I also split coded for turning points,44 looking within each story at multiple points, to reveal structural moments internal to a story during which participants attribute and mark changes in their self-understandings in and over time.

Overview of Troubles, Trajectories, Turning Points

In this section, I overview my findings from coding and analysis of all participants’ stories to share using the above methods and offer an overview of findings across cases as one way to examine evidence of agency and affect remembered and retold in storytelling.

43 I also could have begun with a predetermined list of culturally available narrative arcs or tropes, a la Propp, e.g., but I wanted to let participants stories speak for themselves as much as possible without being preemptively slotted, or as Arthur Frank writes to let the stories “breathe.” 44 I also coded for what Hanks calls discourse genres (i.e., advice, warnings) because I expected teacher stories to be full of them. However, compared to turning points, discourse genres were fewer and far between and did not yield productive results in my analysis of these particular stories. This is perhaps a locus of analysis for future research when analyzing stories from these same participants later on in their teaching careers. 168

Each type of story—to share, bad experience to share, not to share—has approximately

the same number of stories, which Stories not to makes variations telling (see Figure share, 10 Stories to share, 13 1) with several key findings emerging

that are both the thematic (i.e.,

resources) and structural (i.e., Bad experiences to trajectories and turning points), which share, 13 I enumerate here and then analyze in- Figure 1 All stories analyzed for Chapter Four (N = 36) depth in relation to one story in the next section. First, there are about the same number of resources used as resources needed (see Figure 2), which suggests that newcomers are both using and needing resources and are not only deficient or limited, as often depicted in scholarship. Second,

new teachers seem to reference

themselves in the context of being a

resource needed rather than a resource Resources Resources needed, used, 22 used (see Figure 3). Further, the number 21 of resources used is higher in stories to

share (which tend to be stable and

generally more positive), and the number Figure 2 Total number of resources coded in/underneath "stories to share" of resources needed is higher in stories not to share (which tend to be stable but not positive) (Figure 3). Last, the number of resources used and needed is level in bad experiences to share, which suggests that these stories are complex in different ways from the others (Figure 3).

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Stories to share

Bad experiences to share

Stories not to share

Students as resource

Self as resource

0 10 20 30 40 50

Resources needed Resources used

Figure 3 Resources present in "stories to share" by story type and select resource type

8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 Admissions (n = 18) Lessons learned (n = 12) Affirmation (n = 11)

Stories to share Bad experiences to share Stories not to share

Figure 4 Most frequent turning points by story type

In addition to these thematic findings, I also see the following structural points of interest. First, admissions are level across all story categories (see Figure 4). Second, stories to share frequently have admissions and affirmations, but not lessons learned

(Figure 4)—perhaps because they are also on stable trajectories in which new teachers already seem knowledgeable or confident at the beginning of their stories and do not

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clearly mark lessons learned before the moment of their story’s beginning, leaving them

implicit (see Figure 6). Further, progressive Regressive, 11 narratives are more complex in relation to Stable, 21 the number of turning points present

throughout (see Figure 5); and there is a

higher number of progressive narratives

Progressive, among bad experiences to share (Figure 6). 29

Figure 5 Turning points by narrative trajectory type

0 Stable (n = 15) Progressive (n = 16) Regressive (n = 5)

Stories to share Bad experiences to share Stories not to share

Figure 6 Narrative trajectories by story type

From this collection of findings, I see several important conclusions in the collisions between action, affect, and narrative:

Stories worth telling: Despite participants’ frequent off-the-record “admissions” that they have no stories to tell, or how often their turning points emphasized their own lack of knowledge and experience, newcomer stories are replete with complexities that we can all learn from. But it is vital to stop and acknowledge that many new teachers may

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often feel they do not have stories that are “worth” telling or valuable enough experience to share, regardless of the type of story or topic.

Resources relied on and recruited: The level presence of resources used and resources needed suggests that newcomers are not always in dire need but are already relying on and recruiting available resources in ways that new teacher scholarship does not always illuminate. For example, some scholars see newcomers’ existing perspectives on writing as limitations. If we look instead at what people already know that is helpful

(e.g., how to draw on peers as resources), we can see not only prior knowledge as beneficial but also perhaps as a method of using what people already know how to do

(talk to each other) to crack into and open up what we code as “limitations” (previous views on writing or language) (e.g., Farris; Reid “Linking Faculty Development”; Powell et al.). Yet it is vital to note that I coded resources used that I saw present in stories—not only the ones that participants marked linguistically. In other words, where I saw people drawing on their own prior knowledge and experience, I coded a “resource used.” For newcomers who often feel as if they are drowning or bystanders to scenes gone wrong in their own classrooms (as the opening epigraphs share), participants may not feel they are using resources that I see them using in ways that I think our research should note and draw into relief in order to learn how to tell a different kind of disciplinary story than those we have already internalized. If we fail to note what works as well as what doesn’t, scholars who conduct new teacher research and those who act based upon that research run the risk of proleptically calling new teachers into well-worn narrative grooves of deficiency rife with embodied consequences.

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Self as resource needed: The resources participants used most often—peers (e.g., other teachers or graduate students), program (e.g., encouraged textbook, provided assignments), disciplinary practices (e.g., peer review, process, assessment)—suggest that even newcomers have picked up on many encouraged disciplinary (and professional) practices, including seeking support from other teachers and finding resources they need.

Yet I remain troubled by the resource that participants seemed to need the most in the stories they shared: themselves, more individual knowledge, better ways of responding to students in the moment in the classroom. This is not surprising but is troubling, and I want to briefly trouble it further still here for a moment. I want to make visible when participants used themselves as resources without occluding when they also seem to think they needed themselves as a resource to be able to do, know, say, or be more than they were able to achieve in the moments they remember and retell. What I perceive in many stories is the double-edged sword of self-reliance leaving its mark; behind closed doors

(whether classroom or office doors), teachers feel isolated, singularly responsible, and at a loss to act quickly and effectively, which they internalize as personal rather than structural failure. Our educational and national cultures are still dominated by the ruling forces of individualism in relation to work, responsibility, even learning. When individuals fail to achieve or perform required tasks, the blame still typically falls to them, along with a mix of powerful affective responses (doubt, failure, frustration, helplessness). What troubles me most here is the absence of the institution as an agent or participant—as supportive and/or disappointing. As someone with more teaching experience (at secondary and post-secondary levels) who was often speaking from a single step higher up in the administrative hierarchy, I was more likely—during and after

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our interviews—to wonder how our institution had neglected to support new teachers, rather than how new teachers had failed to support their students.

Progressive trajectories as complex: Last, in addition to a level number of resources used and needed, the “bad experiences” category also had a higher number of stories that proceeded along a progressive trajectory. By itself, this is not surprising. By the nature of the question, a “bad experience” is more likely to begin with a framing of something that did not go well, and a “story to share” suggests that there will be something of value by the end for the listener. The results of my analysis that seem salient are that progressive narratives are more complex in relation to the number of turning points present throughout, which suggests to me not that tellers have neat stories of “lessons learned” on an overdetermined progressive arc (feeling ever culturally pressured to be positive, to find the silver lining, to share something educational and helpful with other new teachers) but that there is more going on in stories of bad experiences to share than my own initial assumptions about overdetermined narratives would have led me to believe without further investigation.

Taken together, the above conclusions—that people feel they don’t have valuable stories to tell, that they are already drawing on valuable resources despite feeling internal pressure toward self-blame, and that progressive narratives of bad experiences are more complex than a simplistic reduction to “obstacle overcome” illuminates—are interesting in light of the fact that (as hinted at the epigraphs to this chapter) multiple participants shared stories in which they did often felt at a loss to know what to say to the students in their writing classroom (see also Restaino 27). For instance, James’ story of a bad experience to share retold his experience of a frustrating class discussion about body

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image. During his first semester, James was being observed by another instructor from a peer mentoring group, and his students were discussing a sample student essay from the program-endorsed textbook that discussed body image:

for the entirety of the class, only men were talking about how this isn’t a

real problem, and like fat women are just not attractive, and…this is just

sort of an objectively whiny essay—or a whiny essay because of the

objective reality of attractiveness. And like anything I was throwing at

them, it just wasn’t working… ‘body image perceptions change over time

and you know are dependent upon social contexts…’ It was just not

working.

Similarly, Violet’s story of a bad experience to share retells her “incredibly testing discussion every semester” about rape culture. As someone with nearly three years of teaching experience at the time, Violet held this discussion each semester in her research writing course, in which students responded with comments like “So [women] kind of bring it on themselves,” “the men are really the victims here,” or “it’s really a privileged status to be a victim of rape.” In these conversations, Violet tries to lean back (cf Kynard) and allow students to speak rather than shut the conversation down because, she says,

“I’m so committed to letting them discover things. I try to step back and let people be where they are and know that I can’t take everybody from A to Z all at once.”

All participants told stories of bad experiences to share along progressive narrative arcs replete with rich turning points and various resources marked as present and absent; and all participants had at least one story (from this “stories to share” subset, though certainly others, too) that was rooted in teacher talk Troubles. Yet the curious

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repetition of the additional layered theme of sexist talk and thinking in the writing classroom led me to wonder what was happening to new teachers’ configurations of agency and self-understandings/identities in what seems to be a commonplace layering of

Troubles for participants in my study. During his lived experience, for instance, James was a male teacher being observed by a female peer; and by the end of his nested narrative, he also revealed that the class only had two female students, which complicated his desire to include other voices when he asked, “do any women want to make a comment?” The turning points from his story point to the additional gendered pressures and frustrations of James as a male teacher who wants to interject but also does not want male voices to be the only ones heard in a classroom with three women, one of whose professional role in that moment can be understood to be the silent observer. In some contrast, Violet’s turning points are littered with more tempered emotions in reaction to students responses she has learned to anticipate over time. Yet a resource she draws on toward the end of her story comes in the form of two female students who stay after class to talk privately with her about the tone and tenor of the large group discussion.

Either of the above stories from Violet or James could be used as a case to study action and feeling over time in the remembered and retold story of a newcomer’s teacher talk Troubles, particularly in moments of sexist talk and thinking. Rather than look at every story from my corpus that qualifies for what James dubbed “the old Dr. Suess book: The Story of the Sexist Classroom,” I have chosen to analyze in-depth one particular entry from Penny for the remainder of this chapter, in order to dig deeply into configurations of new teacher agency and affect.

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Bystanding and Bragging: A Case in Generative Contradictions

I first got to know more about Penny as a new teacher and second year master’s student when she opted into my pilot study and opened our initial interview by describing herself as “pro” digital—but only recently so. Previously, in her BA, she had done work on the “evils” of MOOCs compared to face-to-face instruction; but she had already shifted her stance on digital media in the classroom before her first year of teaching, during her first year as an MA student being exposed to disciplinary conversations surrounding composition and digital tools. From the beginning of our relationship, then,

Penny dove into the contradictions of her own experience that were entangled in multiple events and complex in ways she could not always articulate but seemed determined to introduce and explore rather than suppress or dismiss. During our continued interview conversations, I saw this reflected in many of her first year teaching stories, in which I saw her describing herself often feeling like a bystander even as her stories were also the few from my corpus that contained what I would consider notable brags for a new teacher. In Penny’s stories, teachers are Facilitators, Framers, and Knowers in ways that, to borrow from anthropologist Kathleen Stewart in Ordinary Affects, are neither good nor bad but always powerful and mixed. Her stories characterize a good teacher as one who listens, who cares more about students than curriculum, who takes students seriously and values their ideas. Penny’s stories also simultaneously assert the value, importance, and power of being a knowledgeable, caring teacher whose perspective is needed in the classroom, too—despite her concerns that teachers can be dangerous figures if left unchecked and followed without question (see Chapter Three, Penny on teaching, fascism, and film). And while this “good teacher” narrative of Penny’s may seem like an

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overdetermined narrative (or several of them), it is important to note and honor that

Penny did/does not experience them as “overdetermined” and so it is important to be aware of their flattening potential while also acknowledging their power in shaping lived experience.

In Penny’s stories to share for newcomers—particularly those marked as bad experiences—Troubles seem to occur when students’ ideas deviate wildly from teacher expectations and conversations or presentations go awry. In these instances, Penny has often not known how to respond, which leaves her feeling as if she cannot facilitate productive conversation and later, in her retelling, realizing she could have better framed her lesson, introduction of a text, or start-up for discussion (in my coding, this characterizes her version of “lessons learned”). Penny’s “bad experience” stories reveal and acknowledge the risks teachers take in relying on our own experiences and assumptions as individuals (at many levels) and forgetting students as a more complex audience than we articulate often enough. In telling a “bad experience” story (not the one analyzed below) about a self-identified “teaching fail”—using a specific movie as an example for an assignment only to discover not one student was familiar with the film—

Penny says, “I think that’s a good example of projecting how the examples we use, or sample projects or whatever, may or may not reach our students as an audience. I had forgotten to think about my students as an audience for what I was doing, honestly—is what happened. So that, I think, is a good lesson [laughs] because students are audiences for our work.”

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A Story to Share: How Catcalling Went Awry (Spoiler Alert)

The catcalling video story from Penny initially came up in response to a different question: “was there something you didn’t expect to use in your classroom, and can you tell me about how it went?” Throughout our interviews (and a shared conference experience or two), this story kept returning, as something I assumed she would still mark as a bad experience and as something that Penny had also at one point suggested might be a story not to share. During Penny’s first semester of teaching, a video claiming to depict

10 hours of a woman walking in New York City went viral; the video, created by an advocacy group dedicated to ending street harassment, not only garnered instant public attention, but also a later backlash with accusations of racism and other ethical issues (see

Butler’s “The story behind that ‘10 hours of walking in NYC’ viral street harassment video”). Penny’s catcalling video story is one of the many complex progressive narratives shared with me (many by Penny herself) that contains multiple turnings points upon which I read and mapped her retelling of actions and feelings as remembered later and narrated to me. The trajectory of the nested narrative (i.e., the narrative event of using the catcalling video in class) does not align with the progressive trajectory of the story overall—which begins with a newcomer who wants to try something new, faces unexpected obstacles, feels stymied by failure/lack of success, but in the retelling emerges with multiple lessons learned and ways in which these lessons have already, in some sense, been put to work and relived in experiences that occurred between this original storied event and the time of Penny’s retelling. Throughout my readings of this story, I asked: how might the combination of thematic and structural analyses reveal narrated changes in Penny’s actions and feelings over time? And how might the

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configurations of agency and affect in Penny’s story reveal and shape her own identity learning as a new writing teacher?

I didn’t expect to need to tailor my class to current events issues or issues in pop culture, so when the catcalling video came out (which you’re going to think I’m obsessed with, which I’m not obsessed with it)—but this experience [laughs] this experience really shaped why I became interested in the video. Because I thought, ‘okay, this is a big thing that’s happening.’ Everybody in the [composition instructor] office was talking about it a lot, and I was like, ‘I need to bring this into my classroom in some way.’ And I don’t remember—at the time, I think we were doing like analyses—rhetorical analysis or something. And I was like, ‘okay, I don’t know how I’m going to fit this in, but it’s important to me that I bring this up in my classroom.’ So I—I—we talked about it, and I showed it. And then I was like, ‘okay, let’s just discuss this.’ Like I’m not going to guide this in any way, I just kind of want to see where this goes. ‘This is a big thing that’s happening, let’s talk about it.’

And it went horribly. It was awful. I mean, I had—so many of my students were just like, ‘This isn’t a problem.’ Many of my female students—and in my second section in particular—I taught two sections back to back, and I was like, ‘okay, we’re going to try it again in the second section,’ and it was the same: ‘it’s—for somebody to say hello to you and tell you you’re pretty, that’s a compliment,’ and you know, that whole deal. And on the other side of the room, I had a male student who was arguing with her and was saying, ‘This is a huge problem, this is a cultural issue, it speaks to broader cultural concerns.’ And I was like, ‘oh thank god, thank you so much.’

But I didn’t expect to use that in my classroom. I didn’t expect to really—like when I was planning my class and going through comp camp [i.e., orientation] and all that, I thought, ‘okay, I have the texts, I have an idea of where I’m going, we’re going to do that.’ And I didn’t think about needing to address certain things that had come up…

And I also didn’t really prepare for what might happen when I brought it into the classroom. So that was scary. But yeah, that was a big one that I was just—I kind of decided like that morning; ‘okay, I’m going to use this, and we’re going to see what happens.’ Yeah and I saw what happened and was not super happy.

[how did you recoup?]

Well, I didn’t [recoup]. I kind of just let it go. Because it was like the last thing we were doing in class, and I hadn’t expected it to take up as much time as it did. And I think it might have even been a Friday, and I was like, ‘well, shit, it’s like—I can’t. It’s done.’ [laughs] So then the next class, we just started doing something else. I think it was also like right before an assignment was due or something. Because it was like October or right like after midterms-ish. I think the next assignment was due, and I just like—‘what am I going to do?’

And at that point, I didn’t feel comfortable saying, ‘well, here’s what I think about this issue,’ you know. I didn’t want to be preachy, and I didn’t want to seem like I just brought that into

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the classroom because I had my own agenda—which clearly I did, obviously. But I didn’t want to push that on my students.

So yeah, it was rough. It was all—it was a little bit of a cluster. Because I was just like, I— ‘Well, okay, well, that’s where we are.’ I think I left it with: ‘This is something to think more about.’ I tried to have some ending note of, ‘okay, we’ve had—this was like a great discussion, you guys are really thinking about this a lot, and that’s important. Let’s keep thinking about this and other issues that come up.’ And that was it. [laughs]

[would you use the video in class again?]

Yeah, I definitely would. I think—I think it might look different because I think some of the conversation has changed. After that video, more stories started being told, and more conversations were had about how that is both a problem in and of itself and a symptom of other things going on in our culture. So yeah, I think—I think maybe if I were to do this in the Fall, my students would be a little bit more critical of this as a problem, and I think I would feel more confident framing in particular ways so that I could either avoid the ‘this is a problem, no it isn’t’ debate, or allow some room for that and then say, ‘okay, let’s talk about another facet of this. Let’s talk about this as a digital artifact. Let’s talk about it as a rhetorical text. What’s the argument?’ you know. So that some of that could be kind of reigned in a little bit, so that it wasn’t just—

Because it also felt totally out of control when I brought it in the first time. So yeah, I think I would—I would definitely talk about it again, and I also think I would be more comfortable saying, ‘okay, well, here’s my opinion on this, and you can take it or leave it, but here’s what I think, and here’s why I think it’s important.’ And I think I would feel more confident being able to do that without making it seem like I was preaching to my students.

[why?]

I think just because I’m more confident in my abilities as a teacher in general. [laughs] Because that was a big—knowing how much of myself to divulge was really difficult for me my first semester, and I felt much more comfortable with it my second semester. I think particularly because I was doing this food issues theme, and I didn’t know much about food issues. And I was pretty transparent with my class about—‘I want to explore this with you guys, that’s why I have chosen this topic, so my opinions will be forming as yours are and we can share those and figure stuff out together.’ So I felt a lot more comfortable saying, ‘well, here’s what I’m taking from this text,’ or coming to class with stories, like, ‘Hey, I was in the grocery, and I saw all these products, and I applied—’ So I think that helped me realize that I can talk about myself and my beliefs in a way that doesn’t make it seem like I expect all my students to believe that, too, because I just—because I was genuinely forming new ideas in the class.

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Penny’s story of Troubles remembered and retold through a diachronic teaching story crystallizes a narrative event worth “standing under,” as Ratcliffe suggests, with intent rather than for Penny’s intent, to illuminate new teacher learning in a complicated scene layered with issues of failure and surprise for Penny and an increasingly critical awareness of her own learning and identity as a new teacher. First, the resources used and needed retell a story of thematic Troubles as Penny remembers experiencing them in the moment and as she later reflects back on the scene during our interview. Multiple resources are visibly present in her story: media (the catcalling video), peers (who are talking about the video, generating conversation in shared office space), and the composition program (via orientation, or “comp camp” as it’s dubbed and passed on in program lore). The two most prominent relied-upon resources for success in this story, though, are her students and Penny herself. Penny’s students present a synchronic snapshot of individual students as resources both needed and used within the space and time of the classroom in order to have an “effective class discussion”—an experience I assume all teachers have had, feeling repeated frustration and momentary relief. Penny remembers that, as a group, students in both sections of her course did not respond the way she’d hoped. Rather than expressing what she later describes as a kind of “critical” awareness, her students instead present a rather stolid response: “‘This isn’t a problem.’”

But Penny narrates that, in one section, a single student articulates the viewpoint she thought was central to understanding the catcalling video’s kairotic importance—and its presence in the classroom that day—and she recalls responding internally with a far more emotional response than most of her students in relation to the video: “I was like, ‘oh thank god, thank you so much.’” Similarly, I see Penny’s own experience, knowledge,

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and thinking as a resource both used and needed. She used her own knowledge of the catcalling video—and the presumably invigorating conversations that graduate student peers were engaging in around the video’s circulation—to bring discussion of contemporary culture into the writing classroom. But then she hesitates to share her own thinking in face-to-face conversation about the video and, relying on her students’ assumed critical awareness, steps back from her own perspective (labeled here as

“preachy”). Ultimately, Penny describes the entire experience as horrible, awful, scary, uncomfortable, difficult, and out of control. Later in our interview, she circles back to this story and says, “So that was like the worst day of my teaching semester in a classroom.

Just because I felt so defeated and out of control. And control really shouldn’t be the goal. But for like a first semester experience, that was hard.” The mixed results of her and her students acting as resources recruited and relied upon here leaves Penny remembering this bounded Scene—in which her Actions produce an unintended Goal—affectively as a defeat.

And yet—in its retelling, replete with turning points that highlight reportable changes in her thinking and action as a new teacher—this story does not end on a note of defeat in Penny’s retelling or in my reading. Looking at more than the thematic Troubles as Penny remembers experiencing them in the classroom, I can see structural Troubles in

Penny’s story that are equally “telling” of her learning and identity learning—and of the imbalances and breached norms that she perceives, which can be revealed by “standing under” her retelling of this particular narrative event. For instance, there is an interplay between the narrative trajectories of the entire “story to share” and the nested or embedded narrative of the catcalling video classroom experience. The nested narrative

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(Connelly and Clandinin, “Narrative Understandings of Teacher Knowledge”; Gergen and Gergen) is regressive, continually “declining” (Gergen and Gergen 267), framed by negative evaluative statements (Fairclough, 109-12, 171-73) at its opening and closing: it begins with “And it went horribly. It was awful,” and ends with “It was rough. It was all—it was a little bit of a cluster… And like that was it [laughs].” Such evaluative statements occur frequently throughout stories from all participants, throughout the traditional narrative sequencing established by Labov and Waletzsky’s (i.e., abstract, orientation, complicating actions, coda, resolution). The general structure of participant stories tends to begin with evaluation, more like a “spoiler alert” as in Penny’s case, rather than a mere overview or introduction of an event.

Throughout Penny’s story, the embedded narrative is also littered with statements that are not as directly deontic or drenched in affective evaluations as some statements that rely on indexical phrases like “should have,” “needed to,” or “didn’t like the way that,” 45 but their evaluative presence in marking the norms and expectations Penny has for herself are clear nonetheless: “I didn’t expect to use that in my classroom,” “I also didn’t really prepare for what might happen when I brought it into the classroom,” “I didn’t want to be preachy,” and so on. Embedded in these statements are assumptions that

I think many newcomers—and old-timers alike—bring to the classroom: we should be prepared, not preachy; we should plan ahead and somehow anticipate the unexpected; we should know what to do before we do it. I want honor these assumptions because they are felt and can be beneficial to aim for, but I also want to caution against them because they set high expectations for newcomers to meet and only work toward certain Goals and

45 See Fairclough Chapter One0 “Modality and evaluation,” for further definitions and examples (164-190). 184

Actions within a relatively constrained sense of the classroom as a Scene that shuts out serendipity and codes preparation as a hallmark in unrealistic ways that have more to do with knowing than with learning. And when newcomers do not meet such unrealistic expectations, the resulting feelings get sedimented and attached to self- understandings/identities in ways that we all might code and revisit as horrible or awful, assigned as self-blame attached perhaps to the wrong moments. In this instance, the regressive narrative takes place during class, when the preparation for that class discussion would have needed to occur earlier: “I kind of decided like that morning, like,

‘Okay, I’m going to use this, and we’re going to see what happens.’ Yeah, and I saw what happened and was not super happy.” Penny describes her actions without direct evaluative language and does not make clear who is responsible for her “unhappy” reaction—herself for not preparing to frame the lesson or attempt to plan for some rather commonplace responses to sexist behavior in the media, or her students for having those commonplace responses and not seeing or understanding their way to another line of thinking.

But the catcalling video is not the entire story—nor does it predict the arc of the full teaching story to share with a newcomer, which is told on a progressive trajectory, continually “improving” (Gergen and Gergen 267). Penny suggests she would use the video in class again because she says three things have changed: the conversation around the video, her students’ (again imagined or assumed) critical awareness, and her own confidence “in framing in particular ways” and “being able to [share her own opinion] without making it seem like I was preaching to my students.” Her teaching story began with an unexpected action (using a new video/text in class) and had an early

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acknowledgement that said practice needed improvement; then later, temporally, out of the immediate moment and in her reflective retelling, Penny recognizes two things in the coda and resolution to her story: what needed improvement (students’ critical awareness of explicit sexist behavior and cultural authorization of it) and how to achieve it (her framing of discussion and willingness to share more of her own perspective, experience, and knowledge). By having taken this risk, she acknowledges that she seemed to find ways to learn to improve in her following semester’s class: “So I think that helped me realize that I can talk about myself and my beliefs in a way that doesn’t make it seem like

I expect all my students to believe that, too.”

Both arcs—regressive and progressive—are potentially descriptively accurate and present in Penny’s retelling. They also stand in relation to each other, and the framing and weaving of both trajectories is more complex than either is alone, especially considering that the story being told is not the regressive one and that the embedded narrative is a means to another end. A narrative analysis of one of these trajectories— rather than both in relation to each other—might flatten them, relegating them to the status of overdetermined narrative: the optimistic “lesson learned” newcomer tale, or the

“horror story” of the class that fell apart never to be recovered. Instead, the above (and below) structural analysis of Penny’s retelling shows a moment that had a self-marked impact on her learning curve as a teacher; it shows, too, some of the complexities of identity in relation to affect and agency, how powerless she felt in the moment but later felt able to enact a sense of agency in ways that contribute to her feeling more comfortable and more confident. In other words, Penny is not currently experiencing this story as any single overdetermined narrative. In Acts of Meaning, Bruner describes what

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he calls affect regulation, the relationship between affect, memory, narrative, and action.

He argues, “Remembering serves…to justify an affect, an attitude” (Bruner, Acts of

Meaning 58). In Penny’s case, remembering serves in a sense to justify the juxtaposition of two stories with competing narrative trajectories and to justify her attitude about what makes a story to share: as a new teacher, when she can articulate the “lesson learned,” then a “teaching fail” or “horror story” can serve a socially authorized and encouraged purpose in relation to another newcomer46 and, in doing so, serve an identarian purpose for Penny to position herself in relation to her peers. In this interplay of trajectories, we can see how Penny might be swayed by cultural preferences for positive responses or attitudes, by professional preferences for more “effective” teaching, and by educational preferences for clearly marked and articulated “lessons learned,” which we have internalized over time as students and members of other social groups.47

In addition, further structural analysis—focusing on turning points—reveals another layer of Troubles that are linguistic (at the level of the utterance) in addition to narrative (at the level of the story), which further illuminates configurations of agency in

Penny’s retelling and her evaluations of actual and possible future action (and perhaps even restorying). Turning points within a seemingly singular teaching story, in (and through) which a speaker attributes change to a thought or belief, can highlight Troubles,

46 Compare this, for example, to this statement from Penny that aligns with similar statements made by all participants regarding why they shared certain stories with me that they would not share with other new teachers: “I think I wouldn’t share that because there’s no learning moments or like payoff from that. It was just like, ‘This is a really bad thing that happened in my class. Hope it doesn’t happen again’ [laughs].” 47 On a related note, though there were a level number of “stories not to share,” participants often prefaced or closed those stories by suggesting that they were unsure there were any stories they would not share. I assume this is the case for several reasons, one of which is the engraining of a student positionality (i.e., everything can be a lesson learned) and one of which is also likely the camaraderie of our program both within and beyond sites of new teacher support. 187

or breached norms, that are omnipresent in our educational structures. For example, one of the central thoughts in Penny’s story seems to be her teacherly desire to take advantage of a kairotic cultural moment—which, even though it is a disciplinary norm, interferes with the professional educational norms of course coverage and the unyielding march of a program-provided course syllabus and schedule. Penny’s episode could be said to begin when she narrates her thinking about the catcalling video: “Because I thought, ‘okay, this is like a big thing that’s happening...I need to bring this into my classroom in some way.’” From there, the complicating actions of this episode do not “report” the arc or events of the nested narrative of the catcalling video; they report Penny’s retrospective retelling of her own identity learning—if identities are self-understandings, are productions of past and present action that influence future action and are accomplished in and through situated activity (Holland et al.). In this case, the situated activity is retelling a teaching story and articulating lessons learned for both the listener and the teller. Moments of trouble in the narrative are belied by turning points in context that reveal Penny’s embedded beliefs about teaching “underneath” some of the linguistic markers in her story:

1. “But I didn’t expect to use that in my classroom...” reveals a belief that

teachers know what they will and will not “cover” before the course

begins, as evidenced in the syllabus and set schedule and as emphasized in

the pre-term push to “orient” newcomers and “prepare” them for the

semester. This is a belief that programs instill via documents and

institutional demands for prepared syllabi, though individuals in positions

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of authority and experience may say otherwise in ephemeral

conversations.

2. “And also I didn’t really prepare for what might happen...” reveals a

similar belief that teachers are and should be prepared, should (or can)

somehow expect the unexpected, or should (or can) anticipate possible

student responses since, in theory, teachers plan lessons based on

imagined responses. This belief does not entirely negate serendipity but

does underscore the risk of veering off track, beyond the familiar and

known of the program-endorsed text, syllabi, or assignments. Here, the

previous statement from another of Penny’s bad experiences to share

reverberates as well: “I had forgotten to think about my students as an

audience for what I was doing, honestly—is what happened. So that, I

think, is a good lesson [laughs] because students are audiences for our

work.”

3. “Well, I didn’t [recoup]. I kind of just let it go...” reveals a belief not that

teachers should or must recoup (because this utterance was elicited by a

direct follow-up question, which means my language [recoup] was guiding

hers) but that the course syllabus/schedule still holds ultimate sway in

determining what happens next in any given class. And reasonably so, that

writing assignments hold more sway than revisiting class discussions: “I

think the next assignment was due, and I was just like—‘what am I going

to do?’”

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4. “And at that point, I didn’t feel comfortable saying...” reveals what is

narrated as the changed belief or practice by the end of the episode: that

comfort in talking about one’s own beliefs is a way to facilitate discussion,

to introduce texts off the beaten path, and to “reign in” what might

otherwise feel “totally out of control.”

These turning points each complicate the moment of trouble that began this story, tracing narrated changes in Penny’s willingness to halt the usual progression of a class to introduce a kairotic text circulating in popular media, despite the uncertainty of not knowing where such a practice or discussion will take the class.

Generally, these turning points come as a long list marked by conjunctions (“And it went horribly,” “But I didn’t expect,” “And I also didn’t really prepare,” “And at that point”), perhaps suggesting something akin to Gergen and Gergen’s warning that life can often seem like “one damned thing after another” (255). Yet there is some causation later, in the coda when Penny responds to my follow-up question about whether or not she would use the video again. She describes why she thinks using it again would be a better experience and then interrupts herself to make a causal connection to why the original experience felt so bad: “Because it also felt totally out of control when I brought it in the first time.” Perhaps more troubling is that her parity statements (and, and, and) often begin with the construction “I didn’t,” with a marked shift later, again in the coda, to “I would” and “I think I would.” This shows the visibility of the progressive narrative trajectory, yes; but it also shows the long build-up of affective evaluations that are not quite “quintessentially agentive” (Bruner) but are reportable nonetheless—not because they show the ability to bring about immediate effects (Karp) in a classroom but because

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they do demonstrate a socioculturally mediated capacity to act (Ahearn) by articulating via storytelling an understanding of the possibility of later arriving at an improved state

(Gergen and Gergen). This state is one that I argue is not without complications—but that should not be dismissed as an overdetermined narrative of “obstacle overcome” or neatly packaged “lesson learned” either.

Thematic Conclusions: Agency and Teacher Talk

Of several thematic findings, the first is about a newcomer tendency toward self- blame in relation to inexperience; this is what I mean in my overview above, about new teachers so often referencing themselves, their own knowledge, experience, speech as a

“resource needed” in the moment being lived, and being “retold” as not present or lacking. In Penny’s case, what’s “needed” is further preparation, comfort in “divulging” more of self, and confidence in framing conversation to allow room for student voices and then to move on and address medium, rhetorical features, argument, and so on. These things she marks as lacking in herself, needing to be improved and able to be improved over time by her own story’s end. She doesn’t mark them here, in her story, the way I would—as a convergence of conflicting norms that we build in and compel newcomers toward: letting student voices be heard, taking advantage of kairotic cultural moments, being “prepared” for class, keeping on track on a schedule in a given model syllabus (the pedantic pressure toward “coverage”), bringing our own agendas into the classroom, finding a silver lining in any one class meeting (both for students and for ourselves). And

Penny experienced these when she breached the professional norm (sticking to the textbook, the usual script, the “known” entity that you have prepared well in advance for)

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to follow what is arguably a disciplinary norm (bringing in our own agendas to open up conversations and encourage critical awareness) and possibly a program norm (using video and other media artifacts to engage in thinking about contemporary cultures that are active in student lives). This is not the “dual Scene” that Bruner spoke of but perhaps at the very least a tripartite one that is potentially more complex in ways that are outside of my scope (for now). As such, it far exceeds the bounds of most new teacher research advice about a teacher’s own writing practices and assumptions of writing—though

Penny posits herself that medium, rhetoric, and argument are some possible ways to

“reign in” an otherwise out of control discussion. What this Scene shows us is that—even when newcomer views on writing do/may align with “our” own (when “our” is always highly suspect, neither stable nor universal within programs much less across programs field-wide)—classroom Troubles exceed the bounds of the rhetorical triangle we often simultaneously teach and debunk, with consequences regarding newcomers’ feelings of self-blame or perceptions of personal failings and their own sense of agency in exercising power to bring about desired effects (or not).

Another striking thematic finding—perhaps because unanticipated—is one particular resonant thread or relevant plotline running through so many newcomer stories: the seeming omnipresence of talking Troubles in the writing classroom, rather than the oft-told disciplinary tale of writing Troubles. In the above stories, face-to-face talk and writing are not separate issues; but moments of Trouble erupt when newcomers have expectations of our disciplinary “usual suspects” (texts, rhetorical analysis, argument, evidence, writing) that come untangled in and through class discussion. In moments where writing or argument might be the object but speech is the medium, new teachers

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get “thrown in” in ways that stick with them in memory and to them in affect. During one interview, when asked about her second semester of teaching, Simone says, “I know that there were a couple of days where I left the class just thinking, ‘oh my god, I—I just wasn’t responding well today,’ or ‘I couldn’t get them to participate,’ or like ‘why did I say that?’” This Trouble can easily leave newcomers feeling inadequate about their inability to respond agentively, in a way that our commonplace disciplinary narratives— of new teachers’ views on writing, or resistance to structures of support—often elide or underemphasize. This scholarly omission is perhaps related to our inherited new writing teacher research histories, which look so closely at official structures of support as to assume implicitly that learning occurs primarily in those spaces and relationships. Thus, it is no surprise that new teacher research also looks so tightly through theories of writing, academic writing, and academic discourse, occluding other aspects involved in teacher learning. Yet talk about rhetoric and writing is also very much a situated in-house matter woven into epistemologies and axiologies of writing instruction, especially given our theoretical commitment to writing as a highly situated, diversely mediated social activity that entails both talk and text and the generative, recursive relationships between them (Leander and Prior, “Speaking and Writing”; Bazerman and Prior).

Attuning more closely to the role of talk in new teacher preparation—and I would argue, also graduate education—would not just assist our writing praxis alignment; it would also support a more robust view of teaching as a complex professional activity that includes and transcends mediation by writing. The latter is just as important as the former in relation to undergraduate writing education, given higher education researcher Ken

Bain’s insistence in What the Best College Teachers Do that the two key means for

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conducting class effectively are “the ability to talk and the ability to get students to talk”

(117). In the writing classroom, meaning-making between participants happens in the relationships between talk and text, in the vital interplay between speech and writing.

However, while we may circulate this commonplace truth in our own disciplinary talk, we rarely do so in composition scholarship. Textbooks and handbooks often used with new teachers (e.g., Cross Talk, The Norton Book of Composition Studies, St. Martin’s

Guide to Teaching Writing, Teaching Composition: Background Readings)—and therefore also likely the practicum syllabi that are created alongside them48—either sidestep the subject entirely or encapsulate it under a single collocational phrase: “leading effective class discussions” (which gets a whopping three pages in the St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing). For the most part, the above composition guidebooks are ruled by

(also inherited histories of) rhetoric under the auspices of the writing process, focusing on selected canons of invention, arrangement, and style—without much, any, or enough attention to memory or delivery, much less a reconfiguring of the options we inherited from rhetoricians at the time of composition’s emergence as a field (cf Prior et al.).49

Thus, it is no surprise that new teacher preparation scholarship reflects a less capacious focus on writing (Farris, Subject to Change; Reid, “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing”;

Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”; Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach) rather than on the

48 Unlike Rebecca Rickly’s in-depth study of graduate level methods courses via syllabi (“Messy Contexts”), there seems to be no similar in-depth study of teaching practica course syllabi, though inferences can be made from the history of scholarship about practicum courses. 49 Though certainly delivery has enjoyed a resurgence due to our disciplinary turn toward meaningful incorporation of digital media into our writing, teaching, and research, it has not yet gained the status of invention, arrangement, or style, as is indicated in composition textbooks used to teach first-year writing. In our program, this is Andrea Lunsford’s The Everyday Writer, which includes a chapter on “Multimodal Assignments,” in which aspects of delivery receive about one-third of the chapter space, and a chapter on “Making Design Decisions,” which includes digital delivery but also focuses largely on formatting of print-based, page-based texts. 194

“arts of persuasion” that include a dynamic relationship between speaking, writing, and communicating to a specific or immediate audience (see also Selfe’s “The Movement of

Air, the Breath of Meaning”).50

Unfortunately, such a tight focus on pedagogical meaning-making centered on writing comes at the expense of other complexities in teaching writing that are likely just as opaque to newcomers who do not have teaching experience (any more than they have in-depth knowledge of our writing epistemologies). Newcomers might benefit largely from more developed scholarly conversations of how to frame discussions and recover from discussions gone awry—while also gaining the embodied benefit of moments in which they may experience the relief of not being the only one to experience rather palpable teacher talk Troubles and the empowerment of being encouraged to act and feel like more than bystanders in their own classrooms. Spending more time using what we know about writing and writing instruction to research, theorize, and inform teacher talk might help us put talk to work in writing studies in complex ways that a single lesson or mention of “leading effective class discussions” does not address or redress.

It is also telling—though perhaps not as surprising—that so many stories of

Trouble, including Penny’s, revolve around issues of gender and sexism in the classroom, and that talking about that face-to-face brings its own challenges in the moment, without the benefit of distance/removal that we often have in writing. These stories suggest that the intersections of sexist thinking, teacher talk, and bad newcomer experiences as later

50 It is equally unsurprising that many of the commonplace topics in our oft-assigned guidebooks (writing process, invention, responding to and assessing student writing) also work to reproduce rather than destabilize an understanding of teaching writing as an isolated, solitary process that an individual teacher engages in before class begins (scaffolding, developing activities and assignments) and then takes up again after class ends (evaluating, grading, preparing anew). 195

remembered and retold is a commonplace enough occurrence at our particular institution.

And their retelling raises the question of the power of the role of talk in relation to sexist thinking and leaves me wondering two things: (1) how does occluding the intersections of writing instruction and teacher talk relate to sexism in the classroom, which is just as often perpetuated through speech as in writing? and (2) how might we address this intersectional problem in order to abate existing issues of new teacher confidence and authority, rather than perpetuate existing Troubles in relation to new teacher actions or feelings over time? In other words, taken together, these thematic conclusions raise the question about how new teacher support and research attend to particularly challenging and commonplace intersectional issues and make explicit the multiple layers of new teacher learning that are occurring: how to frame a discussion on a (still, sadly) contentious topic (e.g., catcalling, body image, rape culture), how to respond appropriately to students in any given medium and not just in written feedback (i.e., spoken interaction in front of a large group), and how to learn to tell and retell a story that communicates a dynamic identity and that encourages more empowering configurations of agency than our cultures—national, institutional, or disciplinary—often tell about new writing teachers.

Structural Conclusions: Affect and the Unknown

Of several structural findings, the first is my own difficulty in balancing attention to embodied meaning-making with a competing drive toward coherence and accuracy— and I would argue that this is a narrative Trouble as well as a disciplinary one. Looking at

Penny’s own affective evaluations (Fairclough 173) tells a neat progressive tale. She

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begins with horror, fright, and unhappiness; and she ends with increased comfort and confidence, having overcome a marked difficulty. This seems like a series of turning points that mark and trace affective change over time, not just from bad to good but a recursive previewing and revisiting of core affective responses indicated by single terms

(comfort, confidence) and implied in phrasal clauses (“felt totally out of control,” “was really difficult for me”). However, moving beyond the surface-level affective evaluations, I also interpret this story as not having arrived at such a neatly packaged ending. Penny says in the story’s resolution that “I think that helped me realize that I can talk about myself and my beliefs in a way that doesn’t make it seem like I expect all my students to believe that, too.” The first “that” she references is her experience in her second-semester course on a food issues theme, which she acknowledges that she didn’t know much about and “was pretty transparent with my class about.” Rather than addressing the risk and challenges of being “preachy,” Penny seems to have inadvertently allowed herself to evade the issue because she altered the structure of her course to focus on a theme that was as equally unfamiliar to her as it was to students. She also narrates future success based on two changes that are highly contingent and, in part, also attributable to time: one in students’ critical awareness and one in her own increased confidence as a teacher. She says, “I think maybe if I were to do this [use the catcalling video again] in the Fall, my students would be a little bit more critical of this as a problem, and I think I would feel more confident framing in particular ways.”

The evasion and contingencies in Penny’s story can be read as Trouble and the beginning of perhaps more Troubles; it can also be read as Learning and the beginning of more and other Learning. Unfortunately, in new teacher prep scholarship, we are more

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likely to underscore the former and leave the latter implicit. Perhaps because imbalance in dramatic elements and breached norms are more easily visible and traced. Perhaps because we have learned to tell certain kinds of stories about newcomers that are ruled by narratives of deficit, identified using logic and theoretical commitments privileged by more experienced teacher-scholars. Perhaps because each of these reasons, too, enables our own narrative impulse toward certainty and knowing, allowing ourselves to forego the discomfort of multiple or open or interpretations. While we know better in theory, in practice, we may still think of narrative as more orderly and stable than the disorder and instability that Bruner’s “turbulent world” invokes. And perhaps much of our disciplinary narrative research is still unintentionally steeped in this entrenched notion, drawing as we do from literary and psychological narrative study of completed written texts and still entangled as we are with epistemologies and methodologies in departments and cultures where dual views of narrative—as strictly personal and idiosyncratic (see Journet,

“Narrative Turns”) and deeply cultural and immovable—often run alongside each other without always being recognized as paradigmatically paradoxical in some ways. Yet we seem to often understand and espouse views of identity that accept and applaud instability, fluidity, and change (e.g., Butler, Gender Trouble). So here is where I want to leave this narrative rather open and not neatly resolve the tension between believing affective evaluations and debunking the narrative’s accuracy as a learning story. What seems to matter to me most in this story is that Penny is an agent in this teaching story by

Ahearn’s definition (via Karp) of agent as a “person engaged in the exercise of power in the sense of the ability to bring about effects and to (re)constitute the world” (113) if we also understand what Gergen and Gergen call the “social utility of narrative” (264) whose

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social goal is not to arrive at a stable self, but to articulate an understanding of the possibility of arriving at an improved state, to communicate the possibility of positive change (265-66). There are tensions this narrative cannot resolve because no narrative can: the tensions involved in experiencing the cultural pressure to render ourselves as both stable and in a state of positive change (Gergen and Gergen 266), the tensions involved in turning points that both “mark off the narrator’s consciousness from the protagonist’s and begin closing the gap between the two at the same time” (Bruner,

“Self-Making” 74, emphasis mine). I can see in Penny’s story and my analysis of it thus far that “turning points are steps toward narratorial consciousness” located where there is room, what Bruner calls “elbow room for turning points” (“Self-Making” 74). For the purposes of my study, this “elbow room” needs to be made for and by newcomers emerging from Scenes and memories of Troubles through which they—and we—may also learn to articulate our learning in and through story (and re-storying).

While this Scene is troubling in itself, I am more concerned by the fact that it seems to authorize and encourage new teacher researchers to contribute to one rather limiting narrative groove, rather than learning to weave another tale that begins instead with a resonant thread that new teacher researchers have recently advocated for: a focus on teacher learning rather than on teacher training (“Preparing Teachers of College

Writing: A Report on the New 4Cs Position Statement and Suggestions for Putting It into

Action”). My point of contention with some new teacher scholarship is not necessarily that it “fails” by flattening what counts as the purview of researching new writing teachers—because this is inevitably so in qualitative studies that have to be narrowed and genres for publication that have to be abbreviated. And yet. Relying on writing program

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research that only looks at narrowed configurations of the teaching of writing in official structures of support and through theories of academic writing as we have constructed them does not often enough attune to any number of Troubles that everyday teachers are experiencing as embodied newcomers in our writing classrooms right now. By occluding

Troubles as experienced on multiple levels, such program research does not abate issues that matter to newcomers and, in doing so, perpetuates Trouble and makes Trouble (in the form of the master narrative of new teacher resistance) a privileged object and means of study, rather than a means to another end—thus participating in what Judith Goleman identifies as composition’s long history of reading its students and not itself.

Together, these conclusions—both thematic and structural—might seem obvious and familiar to more experienced teacher-scholars. But they are not phenomenologically experienced as such by newcomers and, as such, do not just leave us with implications for improving new teacher preparation and support in our field. They also reveal how narrative as a methodology can show us what we don’t already know about how newcomers experience their early teaching years and, in doing so, can help us learn to tell different stories about, for, and with new teachers as we come alongside them in the process of retelling teaching stories. The tenets of feminist narrative research ask us to use rhetorical listening to defer judgment about individuals in any given synchronic moment or any singular retelling. Further, feminist narrative research also asks us to actively resist flattening and slotting a complex individual or experience into a ready-and- waiting narrative groove (no matter how inadvertently)—whether that groove repeats narratives of newcomer deficit and resistance, or reproduces narratives of transformation and literacy/writing/education as empowerment (as discussed in Chapters One and

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Three). To destabilize entrenched narrative grooves, we must purposefully engage in a willfulness to see individuals as agents and learners entangled in moments of Trouble that are multiple, messy, and on the move—as all of our learning is, as all of our identities are.

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CHAPTER FIVE

MOTIVATED IDENTITIES IN MOTION: NEW WRITING TEACHERS’ STORIED

TALK OF TEACHING TEXTS FOR STUDENTS

I feel like I’m supposed to be experimenting still. I mean, I’m still a graduate student and still not tenured faculty. And obviously you want to keep growing your whole career and learning and changing. But for some reason, I feel like, “oh this is the stage of my teaching where [I’m supposed to be experimenting].” I didn’t get a degree in teaching. I feel like I’m getting my degree in teaching [now]. I don’t know if that’s true, but it feels true right now. —Violet

I would prefer to be a teacher who is in conversation with other teachers [rather] than someone who wrote three pages of notes on James Gee for reasons that he wasn’t sure of, then delivered [them] to his students, who thought James Gee was a dick. —James

What we don’t know about new teachers’ imagined futures and projected desires far exceeds what we do know. Unfortunately, the 2015 NCTE/CCCC survey of writing teachers yielded marginal response from individuals who had completed their teacher preparation in the last 10 years (Johnson). A higher response rate might have shared insights about new teachers’ official program training, which would certainly have updated previous survey work on teacher preparation in our field (Miller et al; Latterell;

Burmester). However, even such survey responses were unlikely to tell us much about who new teachers want to be and why and, thus, unlikely to reveal that I argue in this project that we should be inquiring into: new teacher identity learning. If, as Etienne

Wenger asserts, identity can be understood as a learning trajectory (149), then to

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understand new teacher identities as complex learning trajectories in motion, we must study where newcomers are aiming their trajectories—and why. Who is it that new teachers “prefer” to become? And what do they feel they are “supposed” to do along the way to that becoming? Recently influenced by John Staunton’s Deranging

English/Education, James articulates his preference to be understood as a teacher in conversation with other teachers—not one whose identity is extrapolated from, or sedimented in, a couple of lectures or observations of his early (and fairly standard, we both agree) teaching troubles. To more deeply understand Violet as a teacher, we should not just remember her experiences as a journalism major and her meta-awareness of her own learning style; we should also know more about what she feels authorized to do and be as a college writing teacher because she is a graduate student learner who understands herself—even if only for “right now”—as someone who is getting a degree in teaching and should be experimenting. In both cases, what Violet and James feel they should be doing and who they prefer to become are key to understanding their identity learning in progress because, as Wenger writes, “We are defined by where we have come from and where we are going” (149).

The forward motion of possible futures and preferred identities are seldom an integral aspect of new teacher research in our field. This chapter seeks to redress this omission based on a foundational understanding of learning as highly motivated and complexly situated in ways that include and transcend the typical focus in new teacher research on action motivated by and in relation to writing program training, composition paradigms, or even academic literacies (as traced in Chapter One). Ideally, I have a preferred future for this project: to trace participants’ identity learning both in and over

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time, beginning here and now when these five new teachers’ professional identities are both beginning and shifting and continuing to study these same participants as they gain years of additional teaching and life experience beyond a single writing program or paradigm. At this moment, this chapter offers yet another alternative to the constructed privileging of program training or composition paradigms as primary mediational forces, of academic writing practices or administrator-identified troubles as primary motivational influences behind new teacher action: this chapter illuminates instead individuals’ preferred futures for themselves as teachers in relation to their motivated understandings of learning, teaching, and disciplinarity as well as the often understudied (or at least unarticulated) mediational influence of students themselves. In doing so, this chapter cracks open inquiry not into the actual future but, like any research on identities, into the motivated moments of its becoming. Just as (or indeed perhaps more) importantly, this chapter offers one possible method for recruiting and tracing motivated moments of identity learning via new writing teachers’ stories about, and sparked by, their teaching texts composed with students in mind.

To trace new writing teachers’ preferred, motivated identities in motion, I borrow from narrative research in education that attempts to study identities by studying stories linguistically and thematically. In “Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for

Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shared Activity,” Anna Sfard and Anna Prusak define identities as collections of stories (16) and divide stories from K12 math students who had immigrated from the former Soviet Union to Israel, into two categories distinguished by linguistic markers (which I further define and trouble in the next section): actual identities are stories about an actual or present state of affairs, and

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designated identities are narratives that present what is expected in/for a future state (18).

In “Narrative Understandings of Teacher Knowledge,” Michael Connelly and Jean

Clandinin conduct narrative inquiry into K12 teachers with three emergent thematic categories: secret stories, told in the classroom often hidden from public view; cover stories, told publicly outside the classroom; and sacred stories that are not questioned

(e.g., “theory drives practice,” or “students come first”) (323). Often, this (and similar) narrative work seeks to look at and through narrative coherence via alignment or friction.

Sfard and Prusak, for instance, examine the alignment of math students’ actual and designated identities, depending on the understandings of themselves and how they are

“impinged” by their cultures and communities (19). And Connelly and Clandinin examine the friction between secret and cover stories for K12 teachers in complex relationships with their institutions and U.S. educational culture.

Both of these approaches for studying identities via stories bring in valuable terms that direct attention to salient aspects of identity (present and future; public, hidden, and uninterrogated) as well as methods for studying identity (linguistic and thematic). Sfard and Prusak’s initial methodological distinction for tracing actual and designated identities via linguistic theories of modalities began as a particularly promising starting point for analysis because of the usefulness of the two terms and the gap they help illuminate: while new teacher research in writing studies often focuses on what Sfard and Prusak would label actual identities (e.g., Camp; Grouling), designated identities are less often an area of inquiry in our body of new teacher research. This omission is a substantive loss to disciplinary inquiry and writing program research because designated identities give direction to action (Sfard and Prusak 18), and writing programs (and their administrators)

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are typically quite invested in inciting teachers, particularly groups of new teachers, to action. Further, our program research seems equally invested in answering the question that Sfard and Prusak pose, especially given our commitment to professional development: “Why do different individuals act differently in the same situations?” (14, emphasis in original).

However, of course, both approaches in educational research also have limitations that suggest each framework would be better supplemented by the other—and another.

For instance, the linguistic markers that Sfard and Prusak study present limitations and resulted in findings that are not “telling” enough by distant readings alone because it is difficult linguistically to trace narrativized identities, even via rather robust linguistic theories of modalities as clarified (and complicated) by Jan Nyuts. For example, some constructions (such as “I am”) are far more common than others and do not reveal salient patterns specific to individual tellers; and modal markers such as “I can” might, in context, be indicative of both actual (current) and designated (desired) identities. Further, the thematic patterns Connelly and Clandinin identify for K12 teachers might be present in higher education, but such patterns have not been considered in relation to the contexts of teaching college-level writing. For instance, we might consider some of the resonant threads examined in Chapter One as sacred “unquestioned” stories in our field that have emerged from and are continually reproduced in new teacher research: “training is key,”

“resistance is inevitable,” and “writing is the hero of writing.” Yet the foundational work of this project is not to assume that the disciplinary sacred stories about new teachers and their preparation are the sacred stories that new teachers adhere to or act upon, or to privilege the role of writing programs (and faculty) or academic writing and literacies as

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primary mediational and motivational forces in newcomer professional identity performance. While some of Connelly and Clandin’s work often foregrounds institutional practices or discourses as mediational forces for teachers, my intention here is instead to explore how new writing teachers stories of teaching and learning are telling of implicit sacred stories developed in/through their own experiences, in ways that bump up against the sacred stories in our discipline about new teachers and can refract our attention in productive ways.

Rather than borrow these narrative frameworks from education as is, then, I begin with a linguistic distant reading, which has informed my selection of relevant stories and teacher texts for thematic close reading of identity trajectories in relation to sacred stories of teaching, learning, and disciplinarity in relation to writing students and co-developing scholarly identities (rather than focusing on any one aspect of program training or academic writing). By triangulating linguistic, thematic, and document/artifact analysis, this chapter studies new writing teachers’ situated preferred identities in motion as motivated by shifting—and narrativized—individual desires, goals, and understandings of learning and education. I first describe my methods, both borrowed and adapted, for tracing participants’ actual and designated identities and share an overview of my initial findings. I then describe the data triangulation—linguistic, thematic, and document/artifact analysis—needed to analyze and understand participants’ motivated, preferred teaching identities, since a distant linguistic reading of slippery categories (that are not discrete) is, by itself, not particularly telling. This may be the case, in part, due to lack of methodological transparency, which enables a flattening read of linguistic markers that “count” to study; and in part due to my subsequent attempt to amend the

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seeming tidiness of semantic values (described in the next section), which complicated my coding tasks by taking a tiny net and casting it perhaps too wide. Finally, I offer case studies of two participants, focusing on their storied talk and teaching texts as a robust object and means of analyzing newcomers’ motivated identities in motion. Ultimately, I argue that new teacher research, particularly identity research, needs to pay closer attention to the complex, shifting motivation of new teachers’ movement away from and toward certain preferred identities and futures without a restrictive focus on program training, writing paradigms, or academic literacies/histories as primary (and often flattened/ing) mediating forces for motivating action. In my study, one way of doing so has been to study stories about and sparked by teacher texts composed with students in mind, which are quite telling of teaching identities in relation to the primary audience that should matter to us as teachers: students, an audience that shapes teaching identities in powerful experiential ways that are also understudied as a mediational, motivational force.

In this chapter, then, I also maintain that, methodologically, we have so much to learn as a field about new teacher identity learning that we can begin to illuminate by studying teachers’ texts composed for student learning (e.g., class blog, lecture notes, slides), rather than informational documents for students (e.g., syllabus) or rhetorical acts for other institutional personnel (e.g., teaching statement). This chapter poses, and only begins to answer, several crucial questions: How do new teachers’ stories about everyday interactions and their own recent classroom memories help us trace newcomers’ motivated, preferred identities in motion? How do stories about teaching texts for students show us those motivated, preferred teachers’ identities in motion? And how

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might these stories and the texts that elicit or trigger them help us, as a field, learn to tell different stories about who new teachers are becoming—by inquiring into who new teachers want to be and why? Considering the rich work done in our field in genre studies and document-based research, it is surprising that no in-depth inquiry in our century-long history of new teacher research examines any number of the documents teachers produce that are directly or primarily intended for students.51 Implicit in my analysis of such texts is that they can function as a (perhaps more principled) means of studying new teacher identity learning, as newcomers deploy language, narrative, and other discursive resources to articulate and develop self-understandings of who they are as teachers right now and what kinds of teachers they want to become, in relation to the situated audience of students in their course(s).

Though the two cases presented in this chapter cannot capture all dimensions/causes that motivate individual teachers, they do point to two different aspects of new teachers’ motivated action—both of which could lead us to new areas of inquiry previously unexplored in new writing teacher research. The first is teacher motivation based on a complex understanding of teaching identity related to student learning, relationship-building, and temporality in the writing classroom; and the second

51 Historically, as detailed in Chapter One, new teacher research has focused instead on administrative interviews (Rankin; Farris, Subject to Change; Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach), program surveys (Latterell; Burmester), and practica assignments (Juzwik et al.; Camp; Reid, “Teaching Writing Teachers Writing”). There is a curious lack of scholarship on new teacher syllabi or writing assignments, the more official genres for students; I assume this is, in part, because so many writing programs provide model syllabi and/or assignments to new teachers, which would not make these documents particularly telling of new teachers, just of programs and the administrators who author those documents. This assumption emerges from my own experience as a graduate student WPA in a program that provided a syllabus shell that new teachers in our practicum used and largely adhered to (at least for the two years for which I have this data). 209

is teacher motivation based on shifting understandings of writing pedagogy in relation to disciplinary trends and terms, institutional contexts, and shifting scholarly identities. In the former case, Violet draws analogies between her course website and her own teaching identity that reveal how teaching identities are neither stable nor static over the course of a single semester, with each term in effect operating as a reset, a continuation, and a storied shift (i.e., narratives as recombinatorial in and over time, with retellings inflected by all previous experiences and tellings). Violet’s website and stories are telling not just of One teacher but of the teacher she wants to be on Day 1 and the teacher she becomes by Day 45 (and why). And in the latter case, James traces his own learning and evolution as a teacher in two sets of lecture notes from his first year and, in doing so, reveals how his teaching identity is mediated heavily by his often radically shifting scholarly identities and institutional understandings. His notes and stories are telling of the mediational influence of our own (sometimes quickly rising and falling) disciplinary trends, and they also crack open the question of disciplinarity beyond sedimentation in sub-fields (i.e., literature, creative writing, composition). James’ stories instead raise deeper questions about the infinite number of stances within our field that newcomers try on and try out— as they are also learning institutional and professional politics—in ways that very much shape their learning, teaching, and motivation now and their articulations of their preferred futures as teachers. This chapter enacts narrative as a methodology to study teachers’ stories and talk surrounding teaching texts meant for students—all with the goal of making visible new writing teachers’ oft-neglected preferred future identities and their role in motivating individual teacher action in and beyond any single writing classroom.

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One Way to Read Actual and Designated Identities: Linguistic Modalities (in

Stories)

In “Telling Identities: In Search of an Analytic Tool for Investigating Learning as a Culturally Shaped Activity,” Sfard and Prusak’s framework provides two useful terms, actual and designated identities, the latter of which is unexplored in new teacher research in writing studies. In this section, I explicate how their framework provides an initial methodological entry point for how to study these two key identity concepts in relation to two overarching questions in this chapter (and in this project): who do participants understand themselves to be as writing teachers right now? And who do they want or prefer to be/come in the future? However, their relatively straightforward method of identifying actual and designated identities using linguistic markers is limiting/ed in ways that I complicate, before clarifying how I amended their method using linguist Jan Nyuts’ overview of linguistic modalities.

Sfard and Pruksak’s initial methodological distinction for tracing actual and designated identities is a useful starting point for making designated identities (i.e., motivated, preferred futures) visible and valued, based on implicit understandings of the role of motivation in learning and the constant shifting of identities in motion. Sfard and

Prusak study learning as a cultural activity via a narrative theory of identity, in which they propose that identities are “collections of stories about persons or, more specifically, as those narratives about individuals that are reifying, endorsable, and significant” (16).

They identify “reifying” as a quality indicated in language that stresses “repetitiveness of actions,” such as “be, have, or can rather than do, and with the adverbs always, never, usually, and so forth” (Sfard and Prusak 16, emphasis in original). The other two criteria

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are less simply delineated or clearly marked linguistically: “endorsable” requires a meta- articulation by the “identity-builder” who, “when asked, would say that [the story] faithfully reflects the state of affairs in the world” (16) and “significant” requires a similar reflective distance and meta-articulation that “any change in [the story] is likely to affect the storyteller’s feelings about the identified person” (16-17). Sfard and Prusak go on to suggest that “the reifying, significant narratives about a person can be split into two subsets”: actual and designated identities (18, emphasis mine). Actual identities,

“consisting of stories about the actual state of affairs…are usually told in present tense and formulated as factual assertions,” such as “I am a good driver” or “I have an average

IQ” (18, emphasis mine). From my corpus, some examples include “I am still a young teacher,” “I’m a tech native,” and “I am a secret optimist.” By contrast, designated identities are “narratives presenting a state of affairs which, for one reason or another, is expected to be the case, if not now then in the future” (18, emphasis mine). Designated identities are stories that are “believed to have the potential to become a part of one’s actual identity,” which “can be recognized by [the] use of future tense or of words that express wish, commitment, obligation, or necessity, such as should, ought, have to, must, want, can, cannot, and so forth,” such as “I have to be a better person” (18, emphasis in original). Designated identity examples from my corpus include “I want to be totally inclusive,” “That’s something that I should just trust students to understand,” and “I constantly have to be reactive.”

To trace both actual and designated identities, I relied on in vivo coding as a primary method for identifying and marking participants’ own language and voices (see

Saldaña 105-110) when deploying phrases marking actual or designated identities in

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order to “help preserve participants’ meanings of their views and actions in the coding itself” (Saldaña 109) (see also Charmaz). As a result of an initial round of in vivo coding,

I emerged with a working set of codes across all five participants’ stories of teaching and learning (N = 248) and then categorized them based on Sfard and Prusak’s articulations of actual and designated identities as well as the terms they suggest undergird those concepts, reifying and significant (see Table 7).

Table 7 Initial Codes for Tracing Actual and Designated Identity Definitions Actual identity Designated Reifying story Significant markers identity markers story markers markers From Sfard I am I should be, have, or can Not specified and Prusak I have I ought to (not do) I have to I must With adverbs: I want always, never, I can usually I cannot From my I am I should Always Really corpus codes I have I want Never Maybe I love I have to Sometimes Definitely I like Kind of/sort of I feel Obviously I believe Probably

However, while Sfard and Prusak’s attempts to trace actual and designated identities is useful to ensure visibility of the oft-occluded designated identities that show us new teachers’ preferred future identities, their method of relying on linguistic markers is troublesome because of the complexities and slippery nature of the relationships between identity and language, which they do not foreground or complicate. In “Telling

Identities,” their methodological choices are not supported by transparent articulation of their methods for distinguishing between actual and designated identity markers beyond semantics. Why is “I am” or “I can” reifying, stressing repetitiveness of actions, when “I

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do” is not? And how should we account for the overlap between categories when “I constantly have to be reactive” might, in context, be indicative of both actual (current) and designated (desired) identities? Unfortunately, these are linguistic questions that

Sfard and Prusak do not thoroughly engage with (or show they have engaged with) in their educational research as they make their methodological argument about studying narrativized identities; nor are their methodological choices rendered more transparent via substantive direct evidence from their corpus (see Juzwik, “Situating Narrative-

Minded Research” 18, for a similar, though perhaps more forgiving, critique).

During my first round of coding, borrowing Sfard and Prusak’s brief articulation of how to study actual and designated identities proved too tidy because I wanted to rely on participants’ language and their situated rather than semantic use of possible markers—an exercise of course in working with actual data that requires more suppleness than simplicity. For instance, the distinctions between actual and designated identities by verb tense and specific modal verbs seems based on a discrete container-model of language that, in its neatness, risks being counterproductive in its goals to study the complexities of identity. For example, “can” or “cannot” in my corpus are not just designated identity markers; they can mark actual identities if they reference a participants’ ability or capacity right now in the present “state of affairs.” In addition,

Sfard and Prusak’s framework—or perhaps simply their lack of methodological transparency—also does not account for (or qualify what to do with) the linguistic construction of negatives that are also identity markers: “This is the kind of teacher I don’t want to be,” “I am not an artist,” “you don’t necessarily have to be good at

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designing.”52 Further, their initial separation of “I do” from “I am” makes an implicit division between being and doing, identity and practice, in ways that I want to challenge rather than reproduce: “I do know a lot about writing that my students probably don’t know” compared to “I am an authority in the classroom for a reason.” And finally, the examples provided are too simplistic in ways that lend themselves more to reductive analysis because they imply a focus on stories in which participants directly state factual observations (i.e., “I am an army officer”). This last point is especially significant because I am examining a complex subject always in flux: newcomers’ preferred, motivated professional identities in motion. At the surface level, “I am still a young teacher” is “telling” of very little while so many of participants’ “I am” statements are far blurrier—and more salient: “I am more confident teaching,” “I am an authority in the classroom for a reason,” “I am a living document,” “I can talk about myself and my beliefs.” In their complexity and depth, participants’ stories often complicate neat divisions between actual and designated identities, particularly because so much is slippery in these categories in ways that cannot be easily delineated—and should not be contained in one category or the other, as if the categories or their linguistic markers are discrete.

Altogether then, these points suggest that, to study the useful terms it provides,

Sfard and Prusak’s framework for studying narrativized identities would be better off amended. To more thoroughly engage with the complexities and slippery nature of

52 Note here also the additional pronoun shift complication, as narrated in another’s voice within a story, where “you” is the teller and reflects his current stance toward the subject in its retelling. There are many instances from my corpus that I included as identity markers and makers in which the grammatical subject is not a first-person pronoun. Whether second or third-person, participant statements still meet the criteria of being reifying and significant for the “identity-builder,” though this circumstance is not explicitly accounted for in Sfard and Prusak’s methodology. 215

identities and language, I turned to linguistic theories of the modalities to which Sfard and Prusak’s initial framework only nodded. In “Modality: Overview and Linguistic

Issues,” Jan Nyuts reviews and complicates the difficulties of disentangling what is desired for the future from what is expected or desired right now because modal markers are slippery in English (5-6), making a distant reading of linguistic modalities in any corpus challenging at best, unproductive or disingenuous at worst. More helpful than any contested categories of modalities is the distinction between performative and descriptive expression, which ground analysis in temporality rather than in slippery distinctions between obligation and capacity, evidence and belief. Performative expression describes modal moments in which the speaker is fully committed to an attitude at the moment of speaking; descriptive expression denotes another’s attitude or speaker’s attitude at a point in time not right now, or as a later possibility (Nyuts 15). Though perhaps looser (and non-discrete or overlapping) categories, performative and descriptive expression do not reduce linguistic markers based on verb tense or a consignment of a single verb usage to a single category.

Amended by Nyuts’ needed loosening of linguistic modalities as neatly discrete, my second round of in vivo coding expanded and altered categories for both actual and designated identities based on a broader understanding of performative and descriptive expression (see Table 8). For instance, for actual identity codes, I added can, able, do, and did while also keeping other markers such as am, have, like, and feel. For designated identity codes, I added several am phrases (am going to, am supposed to) as well as other key nouns (goal, plan, ideal). For both categories, I added phrases in which the speaker is not the grammatical subject, such as this is, that is, it is, it might have been, and

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statements communicated in the negative, such as am not, cannot, do not, and would not.

This allowed me to cast a wider, more complex net to honor (a bit more) participants’ situated language use.

Table 8 Initial and Additional Codes for Tracing Actual and Designated Identities Actual Designated Reifying Significant identity/performative identity/descriptive story story expression markers expression markers markers markers Codes from I am I should Always Really first round I have I want Never Maybe in vivo I love I have to Sometimes Definitely coding I like Kind of/sort I feel of I believe Obviously Probably Amended I am/not I would/not Still I guess codes from I can/not I might Now second I do/did/not I am going to Used to round in I have/not I am supposed to At the time vivo coding It is/isn’t I hope (at) first That is/isn’t I wish In the past This is/isn’t Ideal In the future I wanted Goal I need Plan I would have Might have been

Overview of Narrativized Identities—and Turn Back to Stories (and Texts for

Students)

As evidenced in the section above, there remains a tension between trying to “pin down” actual and designated identities and trying to “crack open”—and leave open, rather than closed—our own human narrativized drives toward certainty and knowing. In the case of this study, I want to know who participants perceive themselves as right now and who they anticipate and hope they will become. However, in trying to illuminate a conceptual gap—looking at new teachers’ designated identities as a needed locus of study

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and object of analysis, and doing so by complicating neat theories of narrativized identity—I did not “arrive at” particularly telling conclusions or claims, which I explicate in this section. Instead, I discovered an equally telling methodological gap in our means of analysis, in how we claim to examine new teachers’ identities in writing studies, which

I point to in this section and analyze in-depth via case studies for the remainder of this chapter. In brief, our focus on writing programs and academic literacies as primary motivational forces might in part—as argued in Chapter One—emerge from our methodological emphasis on studying genres intended for academic and programmatic audiences (e.g., practica syllabi, practica assignments, administrator lore, even interviews as part of program research)—an unfortunately tautological groove that more likely reproduces rather than destabilizes our privileging of these forces (and their corresponding objects of study) more than others. And to be clear (as I argue in Chapter

One), the visible aspect of this groove might appear in the genres we study; yet of course it has less visible, though by no means less powerful, roots in the stances we take toward newcomers and new writing teacher research and preparation.

Of all the in vivo codes to trace identities throughout all participant stories (N =

72), approximately two-thirds of the codes marked actual identities with one-third marking designated identities. Unfortunately, the most frequent actual and designated identity codes are not salient because of their commonality (“I am” is a much more common construction than “I like” or even “I do” or “I can”) and the construction of the questions (“I would/not” is much more frequent because it is mirrored in questions that often ask participants what they “would” do or change, or not). Furthermore, the most frequent reifying and significant codes (in line with Sfard and Prusak’s determination of

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what makes actual and designated identities so important to narrativized self- understandings) were particularly higher in actual identity statements: including kind of, sort of, always, never, really, still, and now. This suggests a complex mix of qualifiers when participants are discussing actual identities, including those indicating repetition and certainty (always, never, really, still), uncertainty (kind of, sort of), and change

(now). By comparison, the most frequent reifying and significant codes in designated identity statements had only one pronounced “peak”—maybe—suggesting a more sedimented response of uncertainty about the future, unsurprisingly, without the mix of certainty or emphasis on change. By themselves, then, these frequent individual codes are relatively simple and straightforward, not particularly “telling” of newcomers’ complex identities and preferred futures.

Unfortunately, cross-referencing actual and designated identity codes with reifying and significant codes did not yield particularly telling results either—due not to simplicity, but to overwhelming complexity. I had hoped that cross-referencing these two sets of codes (actual and designated; reifying and significant) might show how certain identity statements were marked by participants’ self-understandings of their repetitive nature in their lives (i.e., reifying) and/or the degree to which a change in a particular aspect of identity might be likely to affect the speaker’s feelings about her/himself as the identified teacher throughout the stories in my corpus (i.e., how significant). However, no patterns of any statistical significance on this point emerged from an analysis of my full corpus. At best, cross-referencing actual and designated identity codes with reifying and significant revealed several common constructions both in and across participant cases

(see Table 9).

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Table 9 Common Linguistic Constructions/Identity Markers from My Corpus Actual/Designated Identity Reifying/Significant Codes Combined Phrases Codes I am Definitely I am definitely I am Kind of I am kind of I am Sure I am sure I am Now Now, I am I am Still I am still I would/not Maybe I would maybe I would/not Really I would really I would/not Sort of I would sort of I would/not Probably I would probably I would/not Actually I would actually I would/not Never I would never I do/not I guess I guess I do/not I feel True I truly feel, I feel that’s true I have/not Always I have/not always

Ultimately, I did not pursue further in-depth study of these individual statements, not only because there were no pronounced patterns in their usage but also—more importantly—because doing so would draw me farther away from my privileged unit of analysis: the story. Mary Juzwik’s critique of “Telling Identities” involves Sfard and

Prusak’s missing definition of narrative and deepening of the narrative-as-identity construct, a gap she generously fills in while relying on their aims to situate narrative-as- identity in a sociocultural tradition and to develop a methodology for studying narrative- as-identity (“Situating Narrative-Minded Research”). My biggest point of contention is that using Sfard and Prusak’s methodology for studying narrativized identities (even amended) led me too far away from stories as a “telling” unit of analysis. Unfortunately, relying on linguistic markers of actual and designated identities—as key as these terms are for my questions here—allows the narrative focus to fade rather than be

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foregrounded, targeting the linguistic unit presumably at the level of utterance rather than opening up to the narrative unit of an entire story (or corpus of them).

Rather than allow the narrative focus to fade, then, I returned to my corpus to see what kinds of stories elicited the most robust talk of actual and designated identities (by frequency of codes in those categories as a whole), asking not what identity statements seemed most reifying or significant, but how such actual and designated identity statements were most productively elicited. In brief, in my corpus, actual and designated identity codes are particularly high in text-based questions, the majority of which surround participants’ storied talk about the self-selected texts they offered as representations of their teaching identities at the moments of our third interview. While the ratio of actual to designated identity codes in text-based talk is consistent with the overall corpus (2-to-1), the number of codes is higher in text-based questions in my study

(n = 147), making such stories a robust method for eliciting stories about perceptions of current identities and preferred futures and, ideally, for cracking open individuals’ motivations that are directing, and will direct, future action.

Of all the questions in my interview study, text-based questions (see Table 10) also demonstrated the highest number of designated identity codes across all participant cases (n = 61). For the remainder of this chapter, then, rather than remain at the level of a distant linguistic reading of my corpus, I triangulate the above finding with a close thematic reading of two participants and their artifacts (see Riessman 91-92 on triangulating thematic and structural narrative analysis). Also vital to note, though clearly many of my interview questions were written for, geared toward, and directed participants back to a teaching statement—it was a serendipitous delight that participants

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Table 10 guided me away from my own blackboxed Teacher Text Interview Questions 1. Describe the background or context thinking about what kind of text of this artifact. 2. Is this something you might use “represents” a teacher’s identity right now. again? 3. Is there something in this artifact When asked to bring in a document/artifact that captures how you see yourself as a teacher right now? that represents their current teaching 4. Is there something in this artifact that captures who you would like to identities, four of the five study participants be as a teacher in the future? 5. Is there something here that doesn’t self-selected teaching texts that were quite represent how you see yourself as a teacher right now? composed with students in mind: two course 6. If you were going to change anything, what would that be? websites (Violet and Nigel), two sets of 7. If you were to take one moment or statement from this artifact, and use lecture notes (James), and a video used as an it as part of your next teaching philosophy, what would that be? example in class (Simone).53 Though an in- What kind of story would you create around that moment? depth analysis of any specific identity marker or code overlap in these stories or cases seems not very telling (without noticeable peaks or patterns), the stories themselves are particularly rich for studying teachers’ articulations of their situated preferred identities in motion (as suggested by the frequency of designated identity codes) as motivated by shifting—and narrativized—individual desires, goals, and understandings. Thanks to participants’ intriguing choices of teaching texts, invested composing for their students, and the richness of their stories about their texts and the composing of them—I was jostled from my own shortsighted concentration on teaching statements and opened up to other textual means of exploring conversations

53 Two participants, Penny and Nigel, did select teaching statements, with Nigel selecting two texts but indicating during our interview that “if that’s it, you can only pick one…it’s the blog because that’s doing/being teaching, rather than talking about teaching, which is yes so much easier to do.” In addition, James’ discussion of his lecture notes also led us to discuss his teaching statement, which was then under revision on his professional website. 222

and stories about teacher motivation in motion. Teachers’ texts for students (e.g., course websites, notes, other conversation or presentations) are not written to be stable, static, or representative (to varying degrees), are often discarded (or already have been), and are not visible to anyone beyond individual teachers and students (now no longer in their courses). Perhaps most importantly, conversations and stories surrounding teachers’ texts are particularly telling of teachers’ motivated identities because they are created for and used in situated student-teacher interactions—a marked distinction from the interviews, syllabi, or teaching philosophies that researchers, institutions, administrators, and admissions and search committees normally elicit to evaluate teaching ability (and, I would argue, identities).

Examining the stories of these teaching texts—and the stories they spark in participants’ memories—complicates K12 educational researchers’ focus on the relationships between teachers and K12 educational culture and is also, therefore, one means of conducting situated identity research specific to college writing teachers.

Stories surrounding teaching texts for students might seem akin to Connelly and

Clandinin’s secret stories, which they designate as “in-classroom” and hidden from public view (“Narrative Understandings of Teacher Knowledge”) and seem also to be a means of breaking down the barriers of teacher isolation and classroom “hiddenness” that

Staunton discusses in Deranging English/Education. While participant stories do some of this work, the stories about and emerging from their teaching text talk also complicate any neat distinctions between “inside” (secret stories) and “outside” (cover stories) the classroom because, in the process of figuring out what kinds of teachers they want to be, college writing teachers do not share the same sedimented frictions between these two

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categories at the national level as the K12 teachers that Clandinin and Connelly study.

Participants in my study have different mediating influences of educational discourses (as discussed in Chapter Three), but not the same powerful national, state, county, or institutional oversight over curriculum that would make tracing secret and cover stories a fruitful enterprise. However—we have, of course, many of our own disciplinary, programmatic, and higher educational sacred stories that are not questioned (e.g., “theory drives practice,” or “students come first”) (Clandinin and Connelly 323). As newcomers are making sense and meaning of their teaching identities—both actual and designated— via storied teacher text talk, they negotiate and navigate not just multimediated, multimotivated identities, but also a slew of sacred stories that are anything but stable, static, or singular at the individual, programmatic, disciplinary, or higher educational levels.

In the next two sections, I conduct a close thematic reading via case studies of two participants’ stories about and sparked by their teaching texts composed with students in mind, with special attention to two things: (1) participants’ articulation of their movement away from dispreferred, and movement toward preferred, teaching identities; and (2) how their stories bump up against sacred stories not only in higher educational culture writ broadly but also closer to home in our field. To demonstrate that no participants’ teacher text stories provide a more telling case than another, I have selected two individuals who are quite different: the teacher with the most formal teaching experience, Violet, and the teacher who perceives teaching as an area most needed for professional improvement,

James. A triangulated reading of Violet and James’ stories and texts shows not how these two cases “arrive at” any singular neat conclusion, but how individual newcomers’

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identities are mediated and motivated by their preferred futures for themselves as teachers in relation to their embodied experiences with learning, teaching, disciplinarity, and scholarly identities; and how individual teachers are motivated by their attachment to certain sacred stories, not necessarily those propagated by their writing/graduate programs or those related to any static construction of prior academic literacies/histories.

Motivated Experimentation in Motion: “I am a living document”

Clarity and experimentation feature heavily for Violet as means of learning and understanding herself and others, as a teacher, student, peer, worker, friend, and family member. Across Violet’s stories of teaching and learning, teachers are situated as learning Facilitators, logistical Clarifiers, and classroom Experimenters. In particular, her emphasis on clarifying and experimenting as vital teaching activities creates in Violet’s teaching identity a tension and a delicate balance. Violet says explicitly, “Another thing I try to be as a teacher is clear and create conditions in which [students] are most likely to succeed, as much as I can without losing my mind.” Yet, as demonstrated in the epigraph to this chapter, she also marks herself as a new teacher who is “supposed to” experiment, try things out, and learn—which often means things getting murky before they get clear again: “I feel like I’m supposed to be experimenting still… for some reason, I feel like,

“oh this is the stage of my teaching where [I’m supposed to be experimenting].” Violet marks experimenting as both authorized behavior for a new teacher and as a self- identified and individually preferred means of learning by doing/trying that worked for her long before she started teaching.

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Violet’s experiences as a student and teacher illuminate both the practices she prefers to move away from and toward—and their concomitant identities based on certain understandings of how learning works and how teaching should work. Often, she frames and evaluates her own previous experiences as a student at the meta level of learning how she learns well (or not). For instance, Violet describes her intro to photojournalism class as a memorable school experience involving digital media when she was an undergraduate student in journalism:

We would have photo critiques every week. Put your picture up, and then people critique. And then you pick what’s the best one. I don’t know that I really take anything away from that, but I do remember it. [laughs] It was a very—this is not the word I’m looking for, but it’s the word I’m going to use—kind of judgmental department. Maybe that is the right word. But very critique heavy. They had really high standards and really specific standards because it was a pretty reputable [program].

During our last interview, when reflecting back on a cluster of stories about her undergraduate experiences, Violet says:

I think that I thrive more under this format [figuring things out, in graduate school]. That’s just who I am as a person. I guess other people learn better from negative critique: “okay, so I don’t do these things.” But that just doesn’t—my little free spirit can’t handle that. Just lemme explore, okay. [laughs]

Violet’s stance toward learning via experimentation does not privilege competition,

“really high” or “really specific” standards—practices that she prefers to move away from and not perpetuate. Her movement toward a different kind of preferred identity can be seen in stories from her own teaching in which she encourages rhetorical dexterity across possible writing practices without upholding or marking any singular method of writing (or teaching writing) as “best.” Recalling a memorable/influential moment from her graduate education, Violet makes a connection between an article by Mike Rose that

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she read in the practicum course as an MA student and her own teaching practice of privileging experimentation as a means of “figuring things out”:

[The article is] about “better writers have more tools in their toolbox, so they’re not stuck in this one method.” Like “I always brainstorm first and then I do my drafting and then I”—but they know that the writing process goes back and forth and that they just are really good at figuring out, “What do I need to right now to get past whatever block I’m stuck in.” And that’s something that since then I’ve done every semester that I’ve taught… We do a lot of stuff in class, but I’ll say, “okay, we’re going to do some invention, and we’re going to use this strategy, which may or may not work for you, so pay attention to that.” Or “now we’re going to try this invention strategy,” or “here, we’re just going to start drafting and just see what happens.” And I talk through, “these are just tools for your toolbox that you can use later and hope you can choose as you need.”

Violet often privileges a “figuring it out” collaborative approach in marked ways, for both herself and her students, rather than a “duke it out” individualistic approach that privileges competition. She continually seems to enact an experimental approach to learning to see what will work best for her students in that moment while also helping them to figure out what she has come to understand at a meta level: identifying ways through which we individually learn best/better.

Violet’s articulation of moving away from competitive and prescriptive practices toward a teaching identity that both enacts and encourages experimentation manifests in her conversations and stories surrounding her artifact: a class website for the first-year writing course she was currently teaching (see Figure 7).54 Violet often marks her present teaching identity as in progress—“I am a living document”—and responsive, an analogy she constructs between her teaching identity and her site, which she can update easily:

“It’s very living document because I’m always changing my schedule all the time… That

54 For each course for which she uses a website, Violet “recycles” her existing site, revising it for the next course rather than creating individual sites for each course. 227

this [site] is not permanent, that’s really important to me because it’s really important to me to respond to what’s actually happening in the classroom.”

Figure 7 Home page for Violet's first-year writing course

In conversations surrounding her site, Violet’s preferred future identity is also visible in ways that both overlap with and give motion to her present teaching identity.

Repeatedly, she indicates that her course website is meant to emphasize “the importance of digital composing in my class and me modeling that,” as a sign to her students that she is “[keeping] up with the times”: “the importance of me trying to get with the times, keep updating my teaching based on my research in classes and things like that,” which creates a temporally moving future-oriented target. Her motivation to be adaptive to changing technologies and to students in her courses foregrounds and structures certain aspects of

Violet’s preferred identity that are both in action now and in motion for the future: perpetually open, always changing and learning. After three years of teaching, Violet has, in part, emerged from her own experiences as a learner, already having become the kind of teacher she wants to be: one who is always in progress and, therefore, also one who will never fully arrive at her preferred future identity even as she continually moves

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toward it. Violet’s stories about her website indicate a narrative of identity learning that differs from her explicit articulation later on in the same interview: “I wish that somebody would tell me what my teaching identity is, based on your observations of me.” In Violet’s teaching text stories, there is no such “is,” no one place (utopia) or single target for arrival. Like her website, Violet is continually “updating” in motion, in relation to multiple audiences, whether updating her teaching based on research, keeping up with rather fast-paced technologies, or adapting to a particular group of students from one term

(or one section) to another.

The sacred stories, then, that Violet privileges—and that her stories bump up against—are not the K12 examples that Connelly and Clandinin offer: “theory drives practice” and “children come first” (323). But Violet’s implicit sacred stories do align with other dominant narratives in educational culture: “All teachers should be lifelong learners,” “Good teachers should be adaptive,” and “There is no one way to learn.”

However, though we may articulate these narratives as foundational and

“unquestionable,” they are far more difficult to act upon in traditional masculinist educational structures rooted in certainty, knowing, standardized curriculum, and systematic-cum-sedimented practice. Further, while the above sacred stories might also go “unquestioned” in our field, they are not necessarily the ones we privilege in new teacher research or preparation, which often concentrates instead on certain sets of writing practices (e.g., Dryer, “At a Mirror Darkly”; Reid, “Teaching Writing Teachers

Writing”; Camp; Rodrigue) in relation to a specific programmatic composition paradigm

(e.g., Farris, Subject to Change; Barr Ebest, Changing the Way We Teach; Guerra and

Bawarshi; Powell et al.).

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Our discussions of Violet’s website, laden with multiple linguistic moments marking her present and preferred future identities, also sparked a (then) recent story of an unexpected classroom interaction that both revealed and shaped Violet’s articulation of herself as a teacher whose identity is not only motivated and in motion in relation to sacred stories about learning and adaptability, but also inflected by a rather sacred story of being “professional” as it bumps up against notions of teaching identity fluidity during the course of a semester. When asked what she might change about her course website,

Violet begins to describe the site’s style, drawing an analogy between the site and her teaching ethos while also interweaving a story about her evolving relationship with the students currently in her course:

It looks so tidy. [laughs] Oh look, except I left the little squiggle in when I screenshotted this [see Figure 8]. I’m not—maybe this—this isn’t the tidy page. Some of the pages are quite tidy, which is for probably obvious reasons. It is a professional form of communication, but I’m just not—this isn’t my ethos really. It’s definitely not black and white. Purple is my favorite color. But I don’t make it—

[what about the previous version of your site?]

It [previous theme] was blue; it did have a greeny blue color, which is a little bit more my personality.

I don’t know; it was just all rigid lines and stuff. But I do I guess try to be less a little bit more distant in the beginning of class because the more comfortable they get with me, the more they—

Oh my gosh. What were they saying today? Oh what did they do today? Today is the first day I ever told my students they could call me Violet now. I never let that happen before they’re not my students. But then, I was just—we were talk—we were working on a project. I’m just like, “Call me Violet. It’s weird. We’re the same age anyway.” So I’m going to try that out and see how that goes with them calling me Violet instead.

Where was I going? Oh, I do try to be a little bit more buttoned up and gridlike, in black and white and red [referencing current site], in my ethos toward the beginning sort of. Because if you get too personable too quick, it’s just—I don’t know they start—I got these kids in the corner, and I love them, and they’re great. They do good

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work in my class, but they are mouthy, oh my gosh. And they’ll just be like, “Can we go now Ms. A?” And just cracking jokes at me.

I mean one time I was working on something, and I didn’t hear that they were talking to me. And so they were being all snarky. I’m like, “you are way too comfortable with me right now.” [laughs]

So I guess being a little bit more professional in the beginning. I don’t want to make it sound like I’m not professional with my students. I always am but—

Figure 8 Schedule overview page from Violet's course website

Violet’s response to students’ behavior in class triggers an unexpected change in hers, the encouragement for students to call her by her first name, which also marks a moment of change in her stance toward authority and relationship-building even while this “change” is aligned with her desire to be adaptive, not only with ways of knowing and students’ styles of learning but also affectively and socially in ephemeral moments that facilitate knowing, learning, investment, and motivation for students in her course. Just as importantly, Violet’s teaching identity is neither stable nor static over/during the course of a single class—in ways that she suggests are also visible in her course site. What seems “tidy and gridlike” in the website’s template design and her more stringent

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schedule of lessons in the beginning opens up over the term, shifting toward her preferred teaching identity grounded in students’ figuring things out for themselves, using self- selected resources, developed skills, and individual and group motivation and direction— a move Violet suggests she would consider writing about in a future teaching statement:

I’m really instruction heavy in the beginning of the semester and then not so much toward the end. They end up moving towards self-directed or group-directed stuff, and I just kind of fill in lessons as I think are necessary based on what they’re producing. I mean, I still have lessons that I want to teach, but it’s a little bit more open towards the end of the semester and a little bit more like in class work days and things like that. So that is something that I can point to based on this website, talking about where on the schedule it opens up like that and where they start taking over a little bit more.

Also resources page [see Figure 9]. This is one of those teaching them how to fish type things. I don’t spend a lot of time on MLA for example. I do go over the basics a little bit, practice a little bit in class, but then I say, “figure it out.”

And there’s lots of things that I do—one of the things I write about in my teaching philosophy statement, or have in the past a lot, is talking about how I think it’s more important to facilitate a place in which they learn to learn how to find the tools they need, if that makes sense. So I’ll lecture on new or confusing materials, but if we’re learning a new genre, I’ll have them research that genre, and then we’ll come together and talk about what the conventions are. Or we’ll do a lot of different process strategies, so they kind of just have that in their tool belt. And then as the semester goes on, instead of me forcing them to do a certain type in class, they can do whatever works.

So the resources page is kind of an example of that. I have a couple of MLA sources on there. And when we get into the—I don’t teach any of the tech for digital projects. Also the requirements are a lot looser in 102. So I just have—I’ll put tutorials stuff and like “you figure it out. You got this. You’re a champ.” I say that exact phrase.

And this is the first time that I was—this semester is the first semester I was able to really articulate that was what I was doing to them. And the metaphors. I was like, “okay, so we’re going to do a lot of reading and then analysis and…those sorts of activities in the first half of the semester, and the end is very more much more production focused and me talking to you less. And the assignments in the beginning of the semester are very structured [see Figure 10] and very specific in terms of instructions, and as it goes on—”

I didn’t even give them an assignment sheet for the group project [see Figure 11]. I said, “we’re going to figure this—well, you’re going to figure this out. I will help but—go forth and fly little birdies.”

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Figure 9 Violet's resources for first-year writing students

Figure 10 Violet's annotated bibliography assignment from the beginning of the term55

55 See Appendix C for full-page-size texts from this chapter. 233

As Violet marks here, her teaching identity is not just

developing over time from course to course, but also

deployed differently throughout a single course. Her

marking of it (“this semester is the first semester I was

able to really articulate that was what I was doing to

them”) demonstrates an articulated moment of identity

learning in and through which she is and is becoming the

Figure 11 Violet's final project kind of teacher she wants to be: one who facilitates her assignment, developed with students students in their own production and knowledge-making and enacts structures for doing so, who acts as a resource for students through which they might figure out how they learn and write best, and who opens up to and for her students as relationships shift over time (both the student-teacher relationship and the student- knowledge-writing relationship). While certainly we understand that learning and identities, like narrative, are recombinatorial over time from one semester to the next,

Violet’s temporal conceptualization of her teaching identity points to moments in/through which she has learned to be/come a certain kind of teacher for her students in the beginning of a course versus the end of that same course—in ways that, in a sense,

“reset” for each new class/term and that were previously tacit for Violet. Yet her articulation of this situated teaching identity for the first time is not operating on “reset,” but will function for her as a continuation from term to term or year to year and as a storied shift in her retelling of her teaching identity both now and in the future. Further, this story sparked by Violet’s teaching text talk demonstrates her identity learning as her story bumps against the “unquestioned” sacred story that “Teachers must be

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professional,” and complicates that same sacred story by pointing to the rather obvious facts that there is no one way to be professional and that we do not have the same professional relationships with students in our courses on Day 1 and Day 45. The latter story is particularly crucial because how we perform different teaching identities within a single course—in addition to how (and why) we learn to do so—is perhaps assumed implicitly in our own experiences or lore; but nuanced research or scholarship on the subject is notably absent in conversations about teaching identities in writing studies.

Preferred future identity as motivated by our own experiences with/of learning is not a locus of study in (new) teacher research in writing studies either. Violet’s preferred future teaching identity is already in play right now, and right now—for now—she is motivated to be a learner and teacher under the auspices of the “go forth and fly” narrative she is (re)telling. Still experimenting, Violet’s teaching identity is open and subject to change based on her understandings of learning, not based on her understandings of a single writing paradigm or practice, as intimated in Christine Farris’

Subject to Change: New Composition Instructors’ Theory and Practice. Farris articulates that “an instructor’s theory of teaching writing would have to be viewed as a dynamic rhetorical transaction between individuals and experience rather than as a coherent and explicit set of assumptions about the nature of writing” (29). However, Farris’ ethnographic study of new writing teachers, like so many others (unpacked in Chapters 1 and 3), often implicitly narrows what counts as “experience” and emphasizes academic writing and current institutional and program contexts for graduate student teachers.

Then—in what seems like a logical extension of this narrowed conceptualization of experience—even as Farris acknowledges that “through the dynamic activity of teaching

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and self-reflection, [instructors will] continue to question and work toward what they perceive as meaningful change,” she also claims that graduate students’ experiences are limiting: that new instructors “are limited by the implicit theory they bring to the instructional setting” (9). There is certainly a “revolving door of a so-called disciplinary paradigm shift of which most [graduate students] are not fully aware” (Farris 14); but privileging our own knowledge of composition paradigms and disciplinary histories will always leave newcomers in positions of deficit—and would not illuminate Violet’s teaching identity from Day 1 to Day 45 or her own affective open stance toward being

“subject to change” based on her experiences with her students and her own learning (not

“subject to change” because of any composition paradigm shift, or not).

So too, Violet’s stories about and sparked by her artifact intended for students also bumps up against one of Sally Barr Ebest’s opening assumptions in her introduction to Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching

Assistants: that theories of self-efficacy (and Barr Ebest’s own data/study) suggest that it is more difficult for more experienced teachers to change. As the teacher with the most years of teaching experience (though still “new,” she had three years at the beginning of my interview study), Violet is also the most articulate about experimenting, changing, trying, and failing as an authorized position for a graduate student teacher—and one that motivates her present and preferred teaching identities in powerful ways. This curious point cracks open “unquestioned” assumptions built into “GTA research,” which often implicitly presumes that graduate student teachers are all inexperienced teachers (as in

Chapter Three) rather than a more diverse group with a range of experiences (teaching and otherwise) and that “GTA” as an established institutional position is a useful term,

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concept, or grouping for new teacher inquiry (or a useful or appropriately situated marker for a certain set of professional recommendations or resources, as in the “CCCC

Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing”). If learning is, as Bruner suggests, social participation authorized and sustained by culture, then all graduate students have already entered graduate education with uneven participation in various cultures including but not limited to cultures where academic discourses of mastery and knowing hold the most sway. Violet has learned to be a teacher who wants to change, be responsive, and adapt to multiple situations and audiences (her students, our field) based on her own embodied teaching experiences and experimentations. Though certainly (as in the epigraph) she understands that there might be some future point in time during which she may see her teaching identity as more stable than it is right now, Violet both is and wants to be a teacher whose identity performance shifts from the beginning to the end of a single term in ways that model her expectations for students’ (and her own) growth and development as learners and writers.

Too Hard and Too Easy: “This is the kind of teacher I don’t want to be”

James is also no stranger to change, having altered stances as a scholar-teacher rather radically in some ways—in his telling and in my perspective—after his first year of teaching, in the relatively short time between my interview studies (pilot and dissertation) and between completing his MA and entering a PhD program. In our first interview, he imagined teaching a graduate level course in rhetorical theory as an “ideal,” as well as undergraduate courses in rhetoric. By our last interview, he had changed his stance toward rhetorical education for “all” as part of a general undergraduate education:

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I started interviewing you about why we don’t teach rhetoric and composition in undergrad classes, and I think I understand why we don’t do that [laughs], which I think probably everyone else understands and I don’t need to explain it too heavily. But the more I think about it, the more I’m like, “because it’s not useful to people who aren’t studying rhetoric.”

In addition to shifting his stance on a “what” of teaching—rhetoric—James had also shifted a “how” as well as a “what” in terms of digital media production in the writing classroom:

I’m very much a deep end guy. So now I was—or first I was like “no digital media.” And now I’m learning—teaching myself how to code and things like that. And I’m thinking about—what if basic html—not to learn html, but to be like you know, “What is this sort of form look like in relationship to what you’re usually writing in?” I feel like a lot of—there’s some people who are doing that, which I haven’t decided whether that’s responsible or irresponsible for a 101 or 102 class to dive into those waters. But I’ve been thinking about that, too.

Across his teaching and learning stories, James tells of teachers as Framers, as

Knowers, and as Tellers. He characterizes a good teacher as one who gives time and extensive feedback, who asks good questions, who cares about people in relation to knowledge-making in discipline. Similarly to Penny in Chapter Four (and Violet), James’ moments of trouble occur when students’ ideas deviate wildly from teacher expectations and classroom conversations go awry. In those moments, James often does not know how to respond, feeling he has not framed conversation productively and later realizing, in his retelling, that he still has a lot to learn despite all he knows about rhetoric and composition (as a field, and theories of). Many of James’ first year stories are marked by these tensions between knowing and learning, evaluating himself rather harshly as needing-to-know-already but also acknowledging himself in a generative position of learning and having a lot to learn as a teacher, compared to other professional activities:

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I will probably feel a similar way about talking about my first year of teaching56 once I’ve had more teaching experience and understood how terrible I was at it, which I already understand.

Full disclosure: I think teaching is, as sort of an academic, the thing that I need the most development in. That’s just something I think a lot. But I don’t think I’m like necessarily terrible at it.

Many of James’ stories are marked by similar evaluative responses toward himself in the complex position of knower, need-to-knower, and authorized learner. In addition to evaluating himself as lacking in experience, development, and expertise (which are not tandem trajectories and should not be assumed as such), he marks himself affectively (as in the opening epigraph), as “self-loathing” and “critical” of himself as a teacher:

One of the things that along this trajectory of the interviews is—I’ve become—I was always self-loathing when it came to teaching for sure. Self-loathing’s too strong, but critical of myself. I thought I knew best about a couple things, and I no longer think I know best about anything.

James’ affective stances toward his own teaching identity are also inextricably wrapped up in his stances toward others’ learning of teaching identities for themselves— which is particularly prominent in the opening and closing framings of many of the stories he said he would (or would not) share with new teachers. Rather than following the oft-critiqued but still invoked Labovian narrative structure—orientation, explication, complication, evaluation, coda—James’ stories (like many of participants’ own teaching stories) often begin and end with evaluation, which is also woven into his narratives throughout. For instance, he begins one story by asserting the value of protecting others

56 During this interview, when asked about a story James would not share with other new teachers, James flipped the script and said, “I don’t know actually. Is there a story that I wouldn’t share? How about you?” My responses included what James references here, which was that I would not share some of my teaching stories that show or reveal how I used to be radically different as a teacher, because (as I told him then) I do not particularly like who I was in some of those stories. 239

from unproductive horror stories that build up a teacher-teller’s ego but offer little to listeners in the telling or the told:

Maybe I wouldn’t share things that (one) were terrifying, I guess. I mean literally terrifying, like they are to instill fear [and (two)] that weren’t pedagogical or informative in any way. So it’s like “oh one time, this literally singular event happened that will never happen to you”… Something that is just—something I’m imagining that would almost be more like a story to give my own cred as a teacher.

Many of James’ stories reveal and acknowledge the risks of telling new teachers they will face things they cannot control, change, or make better. Yet he closes another story by maintaining that he would share those feelings, situations, and circumstances openly with other newcomers:

It would be a story [about his classroom discussion gone awry about body image, from Chapter Four] that I would just say, “Things are terrible sometimes.” I don’t know—I’m critical, or I’m skeptical rather, about optimism generally. So I think it’s important to know that kind of stuff. And it’s also a story that I think about a lot, and I think if someone had told me about that—I don’t know this, because it might have just been something you put in the side of your mind and forget about—but I think it would be something that I could potentially have prepared myself for more.

I think that’s something that [grad] students [who are new teachers] could prepare for—maybe should prepare for. “Okay, this is happening in your class. What do we do?”

I think it’s important to know and think about those things, that those things can happen. I’m talking more about the story of the sexist classroom, the old Dr. Seuss book, The Story of the Sexist Classroom… I would want someone to tell me that. That’s what I—

But I don’t know—I don’t think that everyone would. I guess that’s a question of what you can learn conceptually and what things just have to happen. Okay, I have no idea about that in regards to teaching. I don’t know what falls into which category.

As in this case, James often has no clear resolution at the end of the class or the story, even later upon reflection. He doesn’t have the most clear-cut “lessons learned.” Instead,

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his stories show the messiness and uncertainties of learning and teaching—as well as narrative and knowing. This is a challenging place for any of us to be, perhaps even more so for newcomers for whom so much else is also new (being a graduate student, living in a new city, graduate-level writing and professionalization, building new relationships, first career path or job beginning or about to begin), and is reflective of quite advanced, developed, mature thinking about teaching on James’ part, despite his claims otherwise about his own inexperience.

During our conversations surrounding his teaching texts—two sets of lecture notes from two different courses, from his first and second semester of teaching first-year writing57—James suggested his initial/former teaching identity involved him being both too easy and too hard, which he marks as having moved away from and wanting to continue to move away from. James began his first semester of introductory first-year writing by following the suggested readings in the model syllabus, which included the

Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing with particular emphasis on the “eight habits of mind essential for success in college writing” (“Framework”). The first set of notes [see Figure 12] acted as a kind of script for James’ talking points for the class discussion of those habits of mind—a set of notes and actions that reflected assumptions that James has re-viewed and adjusted by the time of his story’s telling:

I’m not going to say I wouldn’t assign something like that for people to read. I think that that’s interesting. But I think that having notes on those things points to two things that I think were probably true at the time.

One: I didn’t understand or trust that my students could just read about these things. It’s like, “how much can you say about curiosity, openness, engagement, persistence?”

57 James elected to talk about these two sets of lecture notes, though he brought to our interview two folders that he said contained any hard copies of teaching materials from his first year of teaching (including a writing assignment sheet and some notes on student presentations). 241

Why would I have notes on that, right? Especially when it’s a text that they read. It would be like me having notes on the title of this lecture.

And then on the other hand, it probably—I imagine that it was something I was doing probably unconsciously but to fill time. Or because I just didn’t know what I was doing. Like, “I know what we gotta talk about. We gotta talk about like curiosity, you know, more than ‘it’s a habit of mind.’”

Let’s see what I said. It actually sounds kind of interesting, but probably only to me. It says—it’s questions: “is it engaging knowledge about the world or about the self? Constructing or being curious? Being authoritatively agents in the world?” So that’s nonsense, actually.

But I think I was probably trying to—I was simultaneously being too easy and probably asking too hard questions without giving any framework for thinking about them. Because I know that constructing or being curious—

I almost think I was trying to criticize the book in a backhanded way. But I think I was thinking about like, “when we’re curious, are we creating the world in the way that we sort of parse out our curiosity? Or are we finding things that we can understand?”

So yeah, I probably wouldn’t do that [laughs]. I wouldn’t do any of this again. And the reason is for the teacherly ethos. I think that that’s something that I could—I should just trust students to understand if I ask them to read it. Or maybe it could be a writing assignment. But I don’t think I needed to get up there and be like, “let’s break down persistence.”

By “too easy,” James means lecturing students rather pedantically on relatively simple material, as evidenced in his five pages of notes on rhetorical appeals and his two pages of notes on eight bullet-pointed habits of mind. By “too hard,” he means sometimes using terms or frameworks (to introduce concepts) that are too many, too complicated, or not aligned, as when he attempted to make a cohesive connection between the eight habits of mind and the aims and particulars of the literacy narrative (the first assignment in the recommended syllabus sequence). James articulates that the length and detail involved in his early note-taking for class was likely rooted in an early mistrust of students either not reading the assigned homework or comprehending it—and also perhaps in an early

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uncertainty or mistrust about his own ability to “fill time.” Retelling the stories surrounding his own early teaching texts, James marks how he needed to move—and since has moved—away from too easy/too hard, moving away from mistrusting and oversimplifying and “simultaneously” asking too much without framing his disciplinary questions in terms and outcomes that students can understand (especially at the beginning of their first semester of first-year writing).

Figure 12 James' notes on the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing's eight habits of mind

A central sacred story implicit throughout all of James’ stories of teaching and learning is that “Teachers must know their content.” Compared to the K12 teachers that

Clandinin and Connelly study, the stakes for this sacred story might seem to rise in higher education, where teachers are expected to have even more specialized content knowledge to work with undergraduate and graduate students. However entrenched this sacred story still is (and it is), any version of this statement reveals different problems woven into it:

“Teachers must know their content” (assumes content as a stable object), “Teachers must have content knowledge” (assumes knowledge on a possession or container model of 243

education), and so on. Further, while the “unquestioned” story of content knowledge and knowing might seem aligned with Violet’s sacred story of being adaptive and being a lifelong learner, the tensions between knowing and learning are still ever present and quite fraught. As Gergen and Gergen assert (and as I highlighted with Penny in Chapter

Four), narrative as an epistemology presents us with a seeming phenomenological conflict: that we are expected to present ourselves as—and to be—both stable and constantly growing and progressing, both to know already and to keep learning and knowing as a constant. From a position of temporal distance, James can now look back and joke about what he didn’t know about how to structure a lecture (or its length): “Why would I have notes on that, right? Especially when it’s a text that they read. It would be like me having notes on the title of this lecture” (emphasis mine). Yet from other comments he makes, it is also clear that he wants to know more and feels he could have known more sooner if someone had told him (this is the teaching as telling model that

Ken Bain identifies), even as he identifies his uncertainty about “what you can learn conceptually and what things just have to happen. Okay, I have no idea about that in regards to teaching. I don’t know what falls into which category”—a state that is further complicated by James’ situated learning in/of institutional contexts for his teaching and his students’ learning.

James’ motivation to move away from being “too hard” or asking questions that are “too hard” seems to stem, in part, from his growing knowledge of the institutional contexts of teaching, specifically of teaching first-year writing (and rhetoric) in the university. In addition to having changed his mind about the scope and depth of rhetorical education for all undergraduates, at different points across teacher text stories he also

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demonstrates an evolving understanding of the rationale for a program-selected textbook

(in our case, Lunsford’s The Everyday Writer) and a recommended model syllabus (not a mandated lock-step curriculum), as well as the complexities involved in recognizing and reconciling our own scholarly paradigms and preferences with the aims and outcomes of first-year writing at the institutional level:

I think now that I’m seeing the more institutional aspects of things as a doctoral student, and I’ve been here for a little while longer, I’m realizing that things are more complicated than just like, “oh this thing sucks. I’m going to do this thing,” you know. So that’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about.

As his institutional and programmatic experience expands, James develops as a new teacher with not just knowledge but also a deepening, nuanced understanding that the first-year writing courses differ significantly from his “ideal” rhetorical theory class— both of which James suggests (currently) he hopes will be in his teaching future.

Via this text story—not just the artifact itself—James traces some of the messiness of learning, within current institutional contexts, what he now “knows” about several disciplinary terms and trends. As his scholarly identity (and its process of becoming) shifts, he also moves away from being his version of a dispreferred kind of teacher in ways that underscore his increasingly purposeful deployment of situated knowledge to facilitate student learning. For instance, in our conversations about his teacher texts, James incorporates into his stories how he has worked through the relationships between rhetoric and discourse for himself (akin to how some of his other stories show him working through the role of digital media in rhetoric and composition or the role of rhetoric in undergraduate education—since talk about preferred future identities is not solely present in teacher text stories). Part of James’ teaching identity at

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the time of retelling (during our interviews)—rather than at the time of telling (during his first semester)—was visible in our conversations and his stories surrounding the second set of lecture notes (see Figure 14) in ways that demonstrate Wenger’s notion of identity as a learning trajectory, as a situated moving away from and toward. In his second semester of teaching, James began his intermediate first-year writing course with an introduction of James Gee’s concept of discourse communities and came similarly prepared with a set of notes replete with important points for leading and guiding class discussion:

So this one I feel like is a pretty well organized lesson, which I like. So I had all these diagrams that I drew better on the board. I had little people. So it would be—it’s actually a really problematic way of thinking about literacy, but not for students in 101.

If you have a pen, I can show you what I did. [see Figure 13] So I would do this—this is the way I would explain, and then this is sort of discourse and language and shared understandings of language. And then this is the discourse, and then there’s a person out here who doesn’t know the discourse. But then when—if they—if they’re not capable of engaging the discourse in certain ways, it deflects.

But then person here—and I did a lot of “these could be any discourses.” I didn’t do “this is the dominant discourse” or anything. But this person, this could be an academic going to a service learning thing. But then so Figure 13 James' re-enactment of this person—I can’t remember how I drew drawing discourse for his first-year this, but this is basically what it was—figures writing students out those sort of can shape (those are arrows back and forth), and then the discourse expands to include them.

And my whole argument was “this is what the purpose of writing in the university and the intro to composition courses were: to find ways to get better at not one big discourse, but all the different little discourses you find in the academy. To get better at doing that sort of negotiation.”

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James’ self-understandings in this moment resonate with him in relation to his own shifting understanding of the purpose and potential of first-year writing for non-majors and likely non-academics, as evolving alongside his own shifting stances toward disciplinary paradigms and god terms (rhetoric, discourse, media, and so on) and their use value for student learning and success, particularly for students who have different histories and identities than he does.

Figure 14 James' notes on James Gee, discourse, and literacy

The happenstance of James having both sets of lecture notes in the folders he brought in (though many of his other notes were not present and certainly not all of his digital documents had print counterparts in his hanging files) created a moment for articulating how he sees himself as already having changed during his first year of teaching. James views his earlier set of lecture notes as both too long and too messy, not needed to meet the task at hand. His retellings reveal what has already changed and what is still shifting and needs revision moving forward. His later set of notes is a more

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appropriate length for a more complex subject; in addition to being organized, they are also needed—and facilitated for his students (and reenacted for me during our interview) by drawing. His retellings of these differences reveal his changes in teaching behavior as well as his stance toward terms and knowledge-making in the first-year writing classroom: “I mean, really, James Gee is one and a half pages, or I’m breaking down eight terms that everyone knows what they mean in basically about three [pages], you know. So. [laughs]”

Conversations surrounding these texts also reveal James’ motivation for continuing to move away from (“I don’t want to be”) and move toward (“I would prefer to be”) being a certain kind of teacher in the future:

So this is the kind of teacher I don’t want to be. [see Figure 15] I have no idea why I was writing like that. It must have been when someone in class is talking, because I can get anxious and write too fast.

[so when you say ‘this is the kind of teacher I don’t want to be,’ what does that mean?]

Well, it’s not the messy handwriting. It’s what the messy handwriting is indicative of.

In other words, James does

not want to be a scribbly,

anxious mess for his

students; his desired teaching

identity is a production of Figure 15 from James notes, what he indicates as the kind of teacher he does not want to be past and present action, as in his evaluative comments and affective judgments (critical, self-loathing, secret optimist, too easy, too hard), that motivate his future action. And for James, his motivated,

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preferred teaching identity for the future is not beholden to the sacred story of knowing or content knowledge; it is instead indicative of his desire to be in dialogue with other teachers:

I don’t know. I’m thinking about—I mentioned this yesterday in that interview [for an administrative position the following year], which is weird, because I didn’t feel like— I think it was that Staunton book, the Deranging English/Education. Have you read it? It was one of those books that just seemed like so self-evidently correct that I didn’t feel anything about it. But for some reason, I keep coming back to it.

The whole thing is about how teaching needs to be brought more into the open and discussed with other people more. So I think the dialogue of the interviews is a better representation than any of this shit. I think it’s more interesting to me, or I would prefer to be a teacher who is in conversation with other teachers, [rather] than someone who wrote three pages of notes on James Gee for reasons that he wasn’t sure of, then delivered to his students, who thought James Gee was a dick and ableist.

Yeah, the ableist one I actually really liked, because it was a cool criticism even if I don’t think fully accurate. And that student was the same one—the only woman in the class who spoke up during that terrible sexist thing, too. Which, not that women should feel, be—it’s not like “women, talk about this.” But I thought it was very brave and smart of her.

Yeah, look, I wrote “Don’t be a dick to students” in my notes. I might have just said something—I think I might have just made a joke that a student didn’t take well and then said something. I was like, “oops, don’t be an asshole.”

I’ll leave this for you to sort through.

I share the above story in its entirety because it does not adhere to Labovian narrative structure for the most part—but does end with a coda that neither resolves nor closes out the narrative or James’ teaching identity (now or in the future), instead leaving for me as the researcher to “sort through” the open-endedness of James’ interviews, identities, and stories. Ultimately, James explicitly articulates that he prefers to be in conversation and dialogue with other teachers, genuinely cultivating a shifting teaching identity in the

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company of peers58—and he already knows that I will return to him with this chapter in hand to continue our dialogue and that we will continue to talk about teaching both on and off the record.

James’ preference “to be a teacher who is in conversation with other teachers,

[rather] than someone who wrote three pages of notes on James Gee for reasons that he wasn’t sure of” points to another sacred story in our profession and in our field:

“Teachers should talk to and learn from one another.” Yet, like Violet’s sacred story of teachers as lifelong learners, co-constructed teacher learning and dialogic pedagogies seem “unquestionable” but also (like all sacred stories) far more difficult to enact than to espouse. Though certainly individual programs encourage teacher collaboration, institutions still more often constrain than enable us to remain individual teachers of record responsible for what happens behind the closed doors of the classroom (as narrated in James’ recollection of Staunton’s book), often with the untenable weight of layers of labor—institutional, departmental, programmatic, individual—that leave all teachers too strapped for time to participate in genuine dialogic experiences with other teachers before our syllabi are posted and our assignments already sedimented for the semester. Further, it seems important to note that, though James is working his way toward enacting this sacred story about teacher co-learning (in part through our conversations), much of his learning emerges not from peer conversation but from the relationships between his own shifting disciplinary, institutional, and programmatic knowledge and his own experiential teaching “fails” in which “conversation” partners are

58 Similarly, James articulates elsewhere he wants to directly communicate to students in ways that make sense to them, even suggesting that he thinks our teaching philosophies should be written with students in mind as the primary audience—an intriguing proposal in light of my arguments in this chapter about texts composed with students in mind. 250

students, not teachers, similar to Penny in Chapter Four. Penny has realized that students are a far more complex audience than we remember or articulate often enough, even though her knowledge of this did not lead her to think of her students not just as an audience but also as resources needed for success in the writing classroom (until she later read my analysis). Similarly, James’ stories often emphasize his own disciplinary knowledge and student interactions, pointing perhaps to a disjuncture between how he states he wants to learn (from teachers) and how he seems to have learned (from students and himself). (Of course, James’ stories emphasizing his own knowledge and student interactions perhaps also points to me as a researcher not asking questions to elicit the peer interactions James has learned from.)

Conclusions

Violet and James’ cases iteratively respond to and defer answering the questions offered at the outset of this chapter: What can we learn about new teacher motivation and learning by inquiring into their preferred future identities? And how might teaching texts composed for student learning illuminate new teachers’ motivation, learning, and identities in motion? In other words, how might new teacher research shift its focus to historically elided objects and means of analysis—to help us not only crack open inquiry into new teachers’ preferred futures in the moments of their becoming, but also create opportunities for restorying our own previous assumptions (about the primacy of writing programs, composition paradigms, or academic writing)? Different from the ends of

Sfard and Prusak’s or Connelly and Clandinin’s work, narratives of identity learning do not have to focus on alignment or friction, but can make visible both alignment and

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friction in addition to illuminating new cracks in old stories. For instance, in our own disciplinary lore, do we often enough articulate what we have learned from our students?

And how our teaching identities have developed with students as our co-learners? My readings of new teacher research—and of participants stories and their emerging reactions to my analysis—suggest that students are still understudied and less articulated as mediational and motivational forces in ways we would be wise to amend. The storied talk of Violet and James, surrounding teacher texts composed with students in mind, reveals two complex conclusions: about new teacher identity research and teacher identities as fluid, multimediated, and multimotivated; and about new teacher research methodologies and the kinds of texts we historically privilege and risk presenting as somehow representative of teacher identities.

Tracing new writing teachers’ preferred identities in motion reveals more about learning—and its relationship to individualized, narrativized motivation—than the more commonplace new teacher research focus on program training, “comp conversion” (or not), or academic literacy histories/experiences; and such a future-forward focus also reveals new teacher learning differently even than the terministic screen of “troubles” (as in Chapter Four) or the warp and weft of educational histories (as in Chapter Three) that

I’ve examined in other chapters. Eliciting and tracing articulations of preferred, motivated identities shows us who new teachers would like to be/come in ways that are directing their current, and will direct their future, action. We should be invested in learning where individuals are aiming their teaching trajectories since the stories that mediate us along the way come from our own research, shifting scholarly identities, and our own retellings of teaching stories. In examining preferred future identities, we can

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learn more about how teaching identities are mediated both in and over time, neither stable nor static within one course much less across them all, and are motivated by shifting relationships with students and with disciplinary knowledge and stances, in addition to the immediate present influence of programs and program training. Further, a focus on preferred identities assumes and privileges identities as fluid, as beginning, shifting, and being lived out as well as continually retold—a state that we understand theoretically as a given but that is perpetually difficult to enact in our study designs and written representations of identity research.

Rather than reproduce assumptions of the centrality of writing programs and academic literacies in motivating new teacher action, we need to study instead the messy complexities of embodied motivation in motion without flattening who (and what) is changing (as well as how such fluidity effects motivation). What changes for—and motivates—Violet? The digital tools she wants to keep up with, the students in her course who get increasingly comfortable with her, her course website that she uses “to do something different than all my other course materials do,” and her schedule, ethos, and assignments that open up over the course of the term, along with Violet herself as a student-scholar committed to feminist pedagogies, community activism, and trauma- informed practice. What changes for—and motivates—James? His institutional knowledge of first-year writing and our writing program, the students for whom he works to frame complex concepts from one semester to the next, the kinds of notes he makes and takes along the way, as well as his own stances toward rhetoric, discourse, and digital media in ways that directly impact his teaching by both their presence and absence in his privileging, thinking, and speaking. In both cases, Violet and James are student-scholars

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and reflective practitioners mediated and motivated by changing students (throughout the term, as well as from one term to the next) and their own increasing rhetorical awareness of who students are and what they need—in ways that their teaching texts reveal and have shaped already (as evident in their retelling of stories surrounding them).

Ultimately, the cases and questions raised in this chapter indicate one possibility for what can and should be otherwise in new teacher research, pointing a methodological eye in a different—and needed—direction for how we might study new teacher identities as fluid, multimediated, and multimotivated: by illuminating other kinds of documents, artifacts, or objects of new writing teachers outside the typical interview studies (often conducted by an administrator) or even typified generic documents (like a teaching philosophy or syllabus), as a means of learning to restory our own narratives of new teacher identities and identity learning. Conversations surrounding teacher texts for students are telling in nuanced ways about the kinds of teachers newcomers are learning to become in relation to the situated audience of students in their courses. Violet’s course website shows a living document and opens up a dialogue about Violet as a living document, in storytelling moments through which she articulates—and can continue to develop—her teaching stances in action and in progress and her dynamic teaching ethos over the course of a semester. James’ lecture notes show him working within and through his own disciplinary learning and show his shifted teaching identity via his shifting scholarly identity, in storytelling moments through which he articulates—and can continue to develop—his professional learning within his increasing knowledge of institutional contexts and educational ends for his teaching and for his students’ learning.

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Each of the above stories emerged from the robust interaction between talk and text, stories and teacher texts that illuminate some aspect of newcomers’ teaching identities right now. Unsurprisingly, no one brought a syllabus—the genre supposedly

“for” students that is also the most institutionally mandated and rigid in perception if not always in actuality, especially for newcomers. James and Violet selected the texts I’ve described here; Simone shared a video she’d made during a 2-day professional development event to use as a model in her classroom; Nigel shared both his course website and a recent teaching philosophy; and Penny selected her recent teaching philosophy, too. Yet, despite that so much of our teaching—and our teacher development—happens in the unofficial genres, spoken or written, in the spaces in between the official and the recorded, new teacher research in writing studies seldom (if ever) pays attention to these texts, particularly those that are created for students rather than for other institutional personnel. Teachers’ texts composed with students in mind are valuable institutional ephemera—as are their stories, which also serve as a mediational force in participants’ identity learning, in addition to the forces identified elsewhere in new teacher scholarship, such as writing/graduate program practices (e.g., Barr Ebest’s tracing of transmission model pedagogy from graduate faculty to graduate students) or academic literacies/histories (e.g., Dryer’s tracing of affective responses toward academic writing revisited and projected upon first-year students by graduate student teachers).

And teacher action is mediated by more narratives than any genre authorized for institutional purposes can accommodate, foster, or suppress—just as teacher motivation and learning are also co-constructed in ephemeral moments with students that we would do well to elicit, record, and study rather than elide.

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CHAPTER SIX

IN THE MIDST: CONCLUSIONS, QUESTIONS, CHALLENGES OF RESTORYING

WHAT WE’VE LEARNED

I want to tell a story that supports new teacher researchers in continuing to think deeply about how we go about doing research, who our research serves, what narratives our work participates in, and what assumptions such work is predicated upon.

I want to tell a story that encourages those involved in new teacher preparation— primarily WPAs—to think about how much we have normed as more experienced teacher-scholars and to consider what possible findings from my study might benefit new teachers in local programs and structures of support.

I want to tell a story that cracks open opportunities for all teachers to ask ourselves about our long-term identity learning and development and for all teacher- scholars to consider how much we have already internalized so that we might be/come better teachers, mentors, and peers.

I want to tell a story that asks writing studies researchers to re-see terms and collocational questions we study frequently (identity), those we assume we are studying all the time (learning), and perhaps those we think we’ve already studied enough

(narrative).

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The story I tell here is, of course, limited in multiple ways. As Restaino writes of her own study in First Semester, I also do not necessarily conceive of my project as a

“collection of case studies” (18) or of participants as representing “a kind of generalizable example for the field,” either in whole or in part (17). My project traces five newcomers who have shared selectively their experiences, memories, and stories; and like some of the resonant threads I want us to weave ourselves out of, the research story of this dissertation is only one possible story I could have threaded together from those five individuals’ shared-with-me experiences, memories, and stories. While it is outside my scope to trace critiques of the case study (or of qualitative research), Newkirk captures several salient issues about the limitations of any research in “The Narrative

Roots of the Case Study”:

…the issue is not who strips [contexts, inevitably so] and who doesn’t

strip but how each [researcher] strips to create accounts, narratives that

gain the assent of readers. The issue is not which is more Real, but how

each creates, throughout selection and ordering of detail, an illusion or

version of Reality. The issue is not one primarily of methodology and

objectivity, but of authoring and the cultural values embedded in various

narrative plots. (133)

In the version of Reality in this project, I have sought to share the “detailed, alive, recognizable” Realities of my participants (Newkirk 133) as a way to bump up against some of the “cultural values embedded in various narrative plots” about new writing teachers in our field as evidenced in our scholarship (and detailed in Chapter One)—plots

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that are certainly enacted with endless variability in the everyday lived realities of new teacher preparation at institutions across the U.S.

In addition to a small sample size, my narrative goal has also limited what I have seen and shared here. As Schaafsma et al. suggest, “the ways of paying attention determine what you are able to see” (78, emphasis in original) and also what does not get illuminated, since every looking at is also a looking away. In sharing stories of newcomers to restory our own disciplinary narratives of deficit or resistance, of identity flattening or program-centeredness, I have not attended to any number of interrelated contexts for learning to be/come a writing teacher: the liminalities of being undervalued contingent labor, of “living” well below a living wage to be a graduate student, of working in underfunded departments and byzantine institutional structures that make

“work” more difficult than it needs to be, and of feeling deeply underprepared to recruit rather than repress language diversity, to redress deeply rooted racial injustices and systemic institutional racism, to restory buried threads of sexism still pervasive in our culture and in our classrooms, to change cultures of deficit and inferiority surrounding disabilities in ways that move beyond while not obscuring issues of access. Rather than create any generalizable set of practices that would swoop in and rectify any of the above

(or other) needs, I hope instead that sitting with the highly situated, diversely mediated stories of the five new writing teachers in my study might help us all (re)consider the practices, paradigms, and stances we invoke and rely on in our own localized programs— which are not just about and in relation to writing, disciplinarity, and knowledge-making, but are also deeply about and shape teaching, learning, and relationship-building across human and institutional activities.

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Ultimately, the most relevant limitation of this study of teacher identity learning and development is neither sample size nor narrative-sightedness; it is time. I have been observing some participants for two years, working with others for three years (via pilot study), and actively interviewing all five participants for more than a year. Yet two goals of this project (from Chapter One) are, as yet, unfulfilled:

1. To continue to trace teacher development over time, outside the bounds of a

single year, program, or institution—a longitudinal commitment to individuals

as they develop from semester to semester, course to course, and across

institutions over time.

2. To incorporate and make visible participants’ responses to my analysis, a

qualitative research and feminist methodological practice often practiced but

rendered invisible in academic publication.

While this project meets my first two goals—of destabilizing several well-worn grooves

(e.g., of implicit deficit or explicit resistance) and theorizing newcomers’ experiences using interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity—it only allows me to begin to work toward any longitudinal goals that will simply take more time.

Despite and because of these limitations, in this penultimate chapter, I first discuss the implications of my project via questions that my narrative inquiry has raised about our continued need for feminist praxis in new writing teacher research and preparation. I maintain that eliciting and listening deeply to newcomers’ stories of teaching and learning has taught me a great deal about what I have already internalized as a teacher, researcher, and administrator; and listening rhetorically to newcomers’ stories has helped me see what needs to be further restoried in our discipline about our

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disciplinary practices and assumptions (rather than using stories of more experienced teachers to construct any series of centralized stories about the field, as in Haswell and

Lu’s Comp Tales: An Introduction to College Composition Through Its Stories). Then, for the remainder of the chapter, I suggest how my project has raised even broader questions for us as a field. I suggest how narrative inquiry in writing studies is useful not just for newcomers and not just for teachers, but for all of us across stages of development and domains of activity; and I articulate the stakes of conducting complex methodological narrative research in our field to study how we learn identities and clarify the affordances and importance of doing so while realizing we will never arrive at any one point but will always be—as this project is right now—in the midst.

Questions for New Teacher Research in Writing Studies

This project began with a rather loaded question: what can and should be otherwise in new teacher research? Each of my chapters has sought to answer this with its own question. In Chapter Three, I ask, how might we illuminate teachers’ complex histories of teaching and learning over time—in order to make visible the scripts of learning that they are drawn to as learners and operationalize as teachers? In Chapter

Four, I ask, how can we elicit, listen to, and let breathe newcomers’ own stories of teaching troubles, rather than lead with our own preemptive (while also not inaccurate) assumptions about what support new teachers need? And in Chapter Five, I ask, how might we learn about new teachers’ preferred, motivated identities by using interactions of talk and text surrounding documents composed with students in mind? In this study, I have both moved toward answers to these questions and pushed myself to bigger

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questions about research study design and substantive disciplinary change. How else can we study new teacher learning—because narrative is certainly not the only way? And what would be needed for us as a field (not just individual researchers) to work our way through, out of, and beyond our disciplinary histories of studying how we teach or train new teachers, toward how (and why) teachers learn?

One set of possibilities for studying new teacher learning and identity learning comes in the form of what we study. Moving away from a predetermined focus on program practices or academic literacies means moving away from studying the practicum or annual orientation or the graduate student writing done in those spaces/times—and moving away from relying so heavily on administrative lore as part of

WPA research practices, no matter how valuable that lore may be. While new teacher research can be in the service of improving structures for new writing teacher education, there are also other ways to more deeply understand new teachers’ experiences, practices, and identities. Because every moving away needs a moving toward, we then need to be more creative in our objects of analysis. In Chapter Four, I moved toward studying stories to share with other newcomers, whether those experiences were good, bad, or (at least initially) unmarked. In Chapter Five, I moved toward studying the storied talk surrounding teacher texts for students. Though these were not the only stories I elicited or intended to focus on, my distant reading of patterns across my entire corpus led me to see these kinds of stories as robust places to study newcomers’ pressing classroom concerns and their motivations for working toward certain preferred teaching identities. Just as importantly, together, these two possibilities for shifted objects of analysis point to our need to figure out how to study teachers in relation to everyday audiences of the students

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in their courses. New teacher research constructs rhetorical situations enabled and constrained by the genres they privilege (i.e., the interview, or administrator lore), often led by an administrator or other more experienced scholar-teacher in a position of power or authority, with an imagined audience of yet more experienced administrators, teachers, and scholars. There are certainly more creative ways to study the complex, often ephemeral everyday interactions between teachers and peers, or teachers and students— and between both the talk and texts that mediate these interactions; and such methods are already at work in literacy and writing studies research on artifactual literacies (e.g., Pahl and Rowsell) or semiotic remediation (e.g., Prior and Hengst) to name two. Chapter Five especially points to our need for new teacher research to move toward illuminating what we have otherwise occluded: students themselves as a complex mediational, motivational force in shaping teacher identity.

Another set of possibilities for studying new teacher learning and identity learning has more to do with when than what we study. Yancey’s 2002 question—“What other kinds of needs would we identify for TA development if our central concern were not

[the local exigence of specific programs or student populations, or their structures for training] but TA development more generally?” (“Professionalization” 64)—is still unanswered, blackboxed and shelved even by those who conduct longitudinal program research (Barr Ebest’s monograph is the best example) and more often simply not attempted (Restaino’s First Semester is the clearest example). The focus of new teacher research tends to stay focused on the first semester or year, with program training largely at the center. Certainly, there are practical reasons for time-bound inquiry for WPA purposes of preparing new teachers and assessing and improving that preparation (as

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noted in Chapter One), and our continued study of immediate contexts and time-bound practices may be in keeping with institutional demands for accountability and fast research (see Lindquist’s “Time to Grow Them”). But it does not move us toward what we also don’t know about how teaching identities are learned and storied over time, which is vital to any identity research and to more deeply understanding what incites new teachers to action (or not) within our writing/graduate programs. In Chapter Three, I moved away from time-bound program training as a central mediational force by tracing newcomers’ stories of teaching and learning throughout their educational histories. In

Chapter Five, I did the same by looking instead to preferred futures as motivational forces via storied talk of teachers’ texts, which they may or may not rely on again in the future. And moving forward with this project, I will continue to elicit stories over time to trace individual teacher learning and development longitudinally.

An even larger remaining question is not just what scholars study when they research new teachers, or when and where—but also other intricacies of how. In Chapter

Four, I showed how structural analysis of stories—less often done in qualitative narrative research in or beyond writing studies—is one way to work against slotting new teachers into overdetermined narratives in their own stories or in ours. In Chapter Five, I also bumped up against issues in narrative analysis and inquiry, namely the limits of distant reading (in that case, of linguistic markers) and the complications of shifting units of analysis (i.e., toward linguistic markers is away from the story). Moving forward, I will face the challenges not just of eliciting stories and continuing to include participant voices, but also of actively including participants’ responses to my analysis and their own co-interpretations of their own stories. Right now, my project has led me to this question:

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is (feminist) WPA work informed enough by feminist program and/or new teacher research? Feminist scholars’ experiences and perspectives on program administration, graduate pedagogies, and teacher mentoring have a visible presence in writing program scholarship (as evidenced in Ratcliffe and Rickly’s Performing Feminism and

Administration in Rhetoric and Composition), much of which has informed my own stances toward administration and mentoring. However, while some new teacher research does address issues such as representation and reciprocity, I remain unconvinced that the majority of new teacher research is feminist enough if our study designs, aims, and questions foreground what is privileged by those in power rather than what is experienced by everyday participants. Privileging patriarchal structures of training or curriculum, as I explained in Chapter One that we have historically done, turns attention away from the everyday interactions of teachers and students in their courses, which is my focus in Chapter Five and, to perhaps a lesser extent, in Chapter Four. For instance, there is a fine line—too often effaced—between (1) acknowledging our own complicity in offering graduate students limited/ing experiences with effective writing pedagogy and

(2) positioning those student-learners as “having” and bringing in with them wholesale reductive constructs of writing. This line is especially effaced when new teacher researchers do not foreground that writing teacher education in our field is facilitated by a more experienced faculty member, administrator, or scholar-teacher in multiple positions of power over new teachers in ways that endlessly complicate perceptions of resistance, of action, of practice, of teaching and learning. This line is also effaced when new teacher researchers do not foreground that we all—and not just newcomers—have our own conflicted relationships with (academic) writing, institutional labor, and teaching as a

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profession, which means we are also susceptible to projecting our own feelings onto our

(graduate) students with equally mixed success (see Huntley). Too often, without foregrounding the above, stances toward new teacher research reproduce binaries between novice and expert rather than beginning with study designs that will force us to blur that and other unproductive binaries and force us to decouple implicit causal links between our teaching and new teacher learning. So it is no surprise that such stances enable us as a field to reproduce narratives of deficit rather than make it our (feminist) charge to learn to tell more generative stories that lead with newcomers’ capabilities, agency, and learning.

Some of this is a matter of time and locus of study with questions of what is manageable and traceable. However, some of it is also a matter of destabilizing the primacy of the stories we have learned to tell as a field about how we should be studying writing teachers, with particularly crucial consequences for those who are new. Many in our field do enact feminist mentoring, pedagogies, and administrative practices, yes; but it is my contention that we do not often enough enact feminist writing program research, particularly for new teachers who are forging relationships not only with knowledge, but also with each other and their students in complex ways that deserve illuminating without shadows of deficit or resistance. Ultimately, as a field, we still face the challenge to put our understandings of learning—as motivated, as taking time, as not a result of teaching—into practice in substantive ways that would change our new teacher research design not by a difference in degree, but by a difference in kind. For research purposes, this might look like a different kind of program research that might seem less convincing to a dean or provost, but is needed for us as a field nonetheless so as not to participate in

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further devaluing long-term identity learning and development for newcomers. Yancey asks, “Is [the identity encouraged by the TA development program] expressed for the duration of the program only, or is it an identity that can be carried forward into the TA’s larger, more diverse pedagogical career?” (“Professionalization” 72). Studying individuals longitudinally might not look to others like typical (or sound) program research—and in many ways it is not—because it de-centers the program as the primary object of analysis (thereby not privileging the program as the site of all learning and development)—a tricky strategy to be sure in light of institutional outcomes and oversight. Instead, focusing on the relationship between individuals and learning, rather than programs and training, would work toward deeper understandings of workplace education, as Wenger characterizes education—as a deeper negotiation of self rather than targeted competencies in a specific set of practices. Such learning research is a risk within neoliberal institutions and cultures that privilege efficiency over thoroughness and short-term intervention over long-term inquiry. Studying individual writing teachers longitudinally is a slow research project that enacts what we know about learning—that all learning does not occur, is not rendered visible, in 15 weeks—if indeed it is really learning we want to study, rather than primarily our own teaching or training.

Questions for New Teacher Preparation and Support

The questions this project has raised for new teacher research have also led me to this question: what might be otherwise in new writing teacher preparation and support? I do not in this section—or anywhere in this project—seek to offer prescriptive pedagogical practices for new teacher preparation in graduate programs (or, as is often

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the slippery-slope case, for the individual teachers within those programs). I do, however, make two interrelated suggestions. One is a continued call that I join: to work toward deep structural changes to our current (inherited) model of teacher preparation that might bring about ideological changes to support newcomers in developing more complex relationships with teaching as a powerful, agentive part of their professional identity. The second is to work toward such changes at the program level by asking open-ended questions to those within those programs and listening deeply and rhetorically to their responses in order to address previously elided concerns in our body of new teacher research and preparation scholarship.

My dissertation participates in continued calls for educational systems and structures in practice, not just in theory or in mission statements, based on better models of how learning works. For me, the call that rings the loudest is one advocating feminist praxis in graduate education and new teacher preparation: for pedagogies daily enacted, explicitly modeled, and flexibly designed for practical application sensitive to the rhetorical contexts of specific audiences and local needs. Such calls are certainly not new. kyburz calls for rhetorical listening in structures of new teacher support. Restaino calls for ethics of care in new teacher support and WPA work more broadly. Jukuri calls for power-sharing in administrative work. Rickly and Harrington call for feminist mentoring informed by understandings of the unevenness of individual motivation, investment, and comfort with institutional hierarchies (or the destabilizing of those hierarchies). Barr

Ebest calls for good/better teaching in graduate courses beyond the practicum, where research-based pedagogies and understandings of learning should be enacted for graduate students daily. And last, Goleman, Farris, and Belanger and Gruber call for any methods

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of supporting new teachers in building complex relationships with teaching that do not conform to the transmission model of education, to the flattening of teaching as a skill and drill occupation, or to the de-privileging of teaching writing as not real academic work.

What my project offers throughout are nuanced “show and tellings” of our continued needs for these calls and any concomitant actions—because we all still need better and more nuanced ways of connecting with newcomers to our field and of enacting teaching in relation to deeper understandings of how learning, education, motivation, and power work. How do we encourage new teachers to work through and toward generative models for teaching and learning writing? Not by telling them what not to do (the do’s and don’ts, a common discourse genre in teaching, in academia, and in our culture writ broadly)—which might temporarily change their practices, but might also not contribute much to their meta-awareness and own pedagogical reflection. Not by supplanting their learned practices with our privileged ones, which is built on a hierarchical model of expertise that may be sound for some reasons (many experienced teachers might be more likely to know a great deal about teaching) but is also not generative or effective because forced conversion is not a good learning model. But instead by encouraging them to work toward and reflect on a productive model of teaching and learning writing rooted in their understandings, experiences, and desires. In other words, we should support new writing teachers in the ways that we hope we all meaningfully support undergraduate writers.

Such administrative practices, like the research practices described above, present a risk rife with structural tensions because of the historical coupling of the WPA as institutional supervisor held accountable to/by institutions and the WPA as faculty member

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responsible for the graduate education of new writing teachers. Feminist praxis in graduate education and new teacher preparation pushes to destabilize the power relationships between WPAs and newcomers, making teacher preparation and mentoring more solidly everyone’s responsibility in ways that ask us all to keep working toward making connections and deepening our understandings of what we think we already know and do.

In my project, conducting feminist new teacher research has afforded me the opportunity to create some different cracks in the commonplace practices present in new teacher preparation and the ideological problems undergirding them, illuminating several elided concerns not often enough brought to light in our scholarship on new teacher identities or practices. For instance, what stories have we learned to tell about new teacher preparation because we typically situate it first as part of graduate education, rather than workplace training? Certainly, it is both, in complex ways that paying attention to one or the other cannot adequately address for newcomers, for whom so much is new, or for any of us, for whom institutional structures do not privilege or value the intellectual and embodied labor of teaching or mentoring as they should.

The script of feminist praxis—which I prefer—is one way to destabilize and interrogate what we have normed about new teacher preparation as graduate education and workplace training. Feminist praxis is in tension with graduate education as a site of performing expertise via knowing and certainty, historically based on an elitist model in which learning is conceptualized via container model and the function of higher education as disciplinary specialization and classist, racist, and sexist gatekeeping, both of which are further co-opted by neoliberal institutions and their interests (see Gee, Hull,

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Lankshear). Equally challenging, feminist praxis is in tension with workplace training in differently nuanced ways. New teacher training is more than a site of disciplinary enculturation; it is also often an attempt at workplace standardization and coherence based on writing program needs that take precedence over individual instructor learning and development while treating newcomers’ own experiences on an additive model at best and a suppression or replacement model at worst. As a workplace site, our program training and professional development can too easily fall into the groove of (and be ruled implicitly by) transmission models of education and co-opted by institutional agendas with far-reaching workplace consequences for new teachers in the beginning of, and throughout, their careers. In my research, teaching, and administrative work, I prefer to mark myself as a feminist, though I also see narrative and learning researchers and scholars doing similar work without identifying as feminist: addressing and redressing the privileged stories of those in power to rely instead on everyday people and their meaning-making; and acknowledging the still-entrenched falsehoods that learning is what happens when teachers teach (and institutions bestow course credit accordingly, with ever increasing demands for efficiency in which time is situated as the enemy of education)

(Adler-Kassner) rather than more robust understandings of adult learning that foreground relevance and whole-person motivation (see Knowles; cf Sandlin for critical, feminist, and Afrocentric critiques of andragogy).

Within the complex tensions of teacher preparation as both graduate education and workplace training for newcomers, there arises another oft-elided concern: how often does our own expertise, rooted in specific disciplinary histories, lead us to try to problem- solve before we problem-pose? For instance, our teaching writing handbooks are

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structured around largely text-based composition topics gleaned from traditional rhetorical canons with an emphasis on invention, arrangement, and to a lesser extent style in relation to undergraduate students’ written texts. Yet, as evidenced in Chapter Four, new teachers struggle with teacher talk about—and in relation to—rhetoric and writing in ways that are understudied in our research and underrepresented in our scholarship.

Similarly, the complex relationships between talk and text feature in Chapter Five as well, pointing to the “telling” potential for informal storied talk about teacher texts.

While we say we pay attention to informal, ephemeral talk in in the writing classroom and in the practicum, our handbooks, administrator lore, and new teacher scholarship focuses on and captures spoken genres only in relation to the primacy of written ones more than a dialectic between the two.

Finally, one last concern that is, unfortunately, too often absent in new teacher preparation is what happens beyond the first semester or year of training and beyond the teaching of first-year writing (at a teacher’s current institution). How does the practicum support new teachers in learning to teach other (writing) courses? And how do our mentoring and administrative practices support new teachers in articulating and reflecting on how their first-year writing practices and paradigms might—or might not—“transfer” into their teaching practices and identity learning in other courses? While my project has not yet traced this particular concern in depth, it will be an area of inquiry moving forward because participants in my study have already taught (or will soon teach) upper level writing courses, and over time they will likely also teach first-year writing and other courses at other institutions.

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Ultimately, the relationships between new teacher research and preparation are inextricably linked. We need disciplinary theory-building rooted in feminist narrative research to further illuminate the multi-storied complexities of newcomers learning identities as they are entering the profession right now. And—as we are continually rescripting our own disciplinary practices to address tectonic shifts in writing, technologies, teaching, and learning in higher education—we should listen to the stories of future teacher-scholars in relation to other cultural, disciplinary, and institutional shifts so that we can keep learning to better support newcomers in developing more agentive

(dis)positions in relation to the futures they imagine for themselves, rather than any of us remaining limited by, and isolated within, our own histories, experiences, or imaginations.

Questions for Writing Studies Writ Broadly

By asking what might be otherwise in new teacher research and preparation, I also ask by extension what might be different in writing studies more broadly—for all teachers across stages of development, for all newcomers across domains of activity, and for all researchers across areas of inquiry. The questions below arise from what I have learned from my participants and their stories, including but not limited to: seeing students as a resource and as a mediational force in teaching identities and practices; considering how the relationships between talk and text matter and matter more because they are occluded in our disciplinary scholarship on/for new teachers; reconceptualizing writing and writing/graduate programs as something other than at the center for writing

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classrooms to work; and needing continually refreshed ways of studying learning (our own and our students’) and (teaching) identities as they are being learned.

How might newcomers’ stories of teaching and learning help us all as teachers to reflect on what we have already internalized? This is especially important since we all have articulated philosophies that we do not live out evenly in everyday pedagogical practice. How do we learn how to handle classroom discussions gone awry? What are the strategies we use, and how do we share them with other teacher-learners? Furthermore, what do the texts we create for students tell us (and others) about our motivated identities in motion? Like Violet, I suspect that many of us are a different teacher on Day 1 than on

Day 45, for a multitude of reasons that we have narrativized over time to ourselves, if not to others, and that are (and will continue to be) recombinatorial over time, shaping us in implicit ways as we proceed from class to class, course to course, and across institutions.

And finally, what stories would we share with someone about to teach writing for the first time? And what might this tell experienced teachers about our own stances toward learning, teaching, and mentoring? Two discourse genres might be more familiar in teaching lore: complaint and advice.59 Stories, by contrast, might have any multitude of discourse genres embedded within them but with a different overall purpose (to revisit

Riessman’s definition), to articulate some moment of trouble or rupture that provokes any embodied reaction in the teller, not a specific reaction.

59 See Hanks’ “Elements of Communicative Practice” on discourse genres including but not limited to the specific genres that Anderson and Romano identify in composition lore (“angry tales of oppression and disappointment”) (4) or the common tropes present in Haswell and Lu’s Comp Tales (evaluation anxiety, novicehood, mistakes made, misunderstood moments of trouble, acts of misinterpretation). 273

How can studying newcomers help us as a field to slow down and make explicit what we have already normed? This question exceeds teaching and reaches into all aspects of newcomer enculturation, including but not limited to broad categories of research, administration, and mentoring as well as specifics of writing for publication, conducting a job search, community-building in a new city or institution, working in/with communities in and beyond the university, and the list goes on. As a field, we have a vested interest in disciplinary enculturation as well as professional enculturation writ more broadly (Prior, Writing/Disciplinarity; Anderson and Romano); and we have included scholarly work from newcomers, including graduate student WPAs (Goodburn and Leverenz; Hea and Turnley; Christoph et al.; Duffy et al.), graduate student voices

(Good and Warshauer), and a dedicated “Emerging Voices” section in College English.

My project here privileges the embodied experiences and stories of newcomers rather than their academic scholarship. In listening to and sharing their stories, I ask, how can listening deeply to these stories help us learn more about what we have internalized that can make us better mentors for newcomers, for our peers, even for ourselves?

How does enacting narrative as a methodology for studying identity learning present a needed research challenge? In my own work, this question has been threefold at minimum. First, how do our own theoretical commitments to writing not only facilitate but also complicate our vested interest in and studying of identities? I find several questions to be assumed or elided rather than explicitly interrogated in new teacher research in ways that are relevant more broadly to our field, too: Are identities traceable in writing, and if so, how? How is our research mediated by uneven relationships between people in positions of power and those we study? These are questions I have

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only bumped up against in this project; they are also questions I would argue that many may think we have answered and addressed adequately. As a field, we do seem to want to continually refresh how we study and conceptualize identities; my project participates in and encourages this desire by engaging in slow research and calling for even/ever more creative practices in selecting both object and means of analyses that include but are not limited to written texts or writing practices.

Second, how does our disciplinary commitment to teaching shape our perspectives on what counts as learning and/in educational research in invisible ways? Is learning traceable in writing, and if so, how? In our research, how do we make explicit the same challenges we face in tracing learning as teachers? These are also questions I’ve bumped up against (and will continue to do so) that we continue to pursue as a field invested in assessment and research-informed change. Evidence of learning is as co- constructed as learning itself, in ways that make it challenging to capture, assume, and represent. This is, I suspect, why so much of new teacher research has historically focused on training rather than education, on how we teach rather than how new teachers learn. Researching learning is risky, methodologically and ethically, and reminds us that teaching is risky, too. How do we make distinctions between what students already know and what they have learned? How do we assess learning instead of knowing? And how we do we study learning rather than not-knowing, studying a generative aspect of education rather than a deficit? These perennial assessment problems are learning research challenges, too. In this project, I have chosen to approach this challenge via narrative, which is itself just as complex and slippery as identity and learning.

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Finally, how does our own cultural/institutional/workplace blindness keep us from seeing multiple other stories at work within any social group in a seemingly singular institutional site? Narrative is a way to find out not just the what or how, but also the why when there is always more than one mediational, motivational force at work within, for example, the seemingly singular institutional site of the practicum or a writing program.

Thus, narrative work is messy, complex, and always shifting. Even when we capture the self-reported why in language and textual interactions, we can’t assume that’s where people stay; it’s simply where they paused for a moment in their articulation of a shifting self. What rigorous narrative research requires, then, are practices that align our questions about narrative with our methods for studying it and our timelines for doing so. This includes using, adapting, and questioning our methods for narrative research (cf

Sheridan’s “Making Ethnography Our Own”) as well as considering the possibilities of using and designing digital tools for close and distant readings of narratives (see Gries’ article on iconographic tracking, e.g.), whether the narratives are existing (as in Joyce

Walker’s online analysis of 9/11 grief memorials) or elicited (as in Dryer’s article on graduate student teachers, which uses software to analyze a corpus of collected interviews). In any case, we must be careful to select methods of data collection and analysis that help us further our understanding of narrative as interpretive, as a way that we experience and make meaning of ourselves and our worlds in and through semiotic means (whether explicit or implicit, conscious or unconscious, created by us or others).

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Possible Futures for Narrative and New Teacher Identity Learning in Writing

Studies

Ultimately, as a feminist narrative researcher, teacher, and administrator, I understand narrative as epistemological, as a mediational force that changes what we know and how we know it, and as phenomenological, as a way of experiencing the world with the bodies and minds we use to tell and live out our stories. And I firmly believe that one way to approach improving institutional practice and newcomer support comes at a slant via stories. Pragmatically, then, using narrative as a methodology to reveal new teacher identity learning raises questions about our own disciplinary agency: what to do next, and who is to do it? How do we support newcomers in working through multiple, often conflicting scripts of teaching and learning in increasingly scrutinized workplaces under pressure during eras of austerity and accountability? I certainly agree with and applaud Barr Ebest’s (and others’) call for graduate faculty to be better teachers; but much of that is unintentionally aimed at the literature faculty who are often primary teaching contacts for so many literature graduate students who are the presumed objects

(of resistance) in much new teacher research. And, more problematically still, so much of that is beyond our disciplinary or individual control. My focus is instead on what we can do with our own new teacher research, which is (relatively) under our control. What can we offer to new teachers by creating better stories about them over time (as in Chapter

Three)? By reconsidering our own expertise in relation to their identified troubles (as in

Chapter Four)? And by looking at more/other objects to learn about teachers’ motivated futures (as in Chapter Five)?

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Several possible futures for new teacher identity learning research and research- based action are enacted in this project. The first is collecting stories via narrative research. New teachers can use stories to make meaning even when they can’t make sense; and meaning-making via story is not meant necessarily to analyze—but to let the story breathe (see Frank) without forcing it into orderly linearity structured for immediate dissection (see also Wilson) or eventual epiphany. While some participants did end stories with relatively neat “lessons learned” (as discussed in the next chapter), most just—ended. Perhaps with a linguistic marker: “so,” or “you know,” or “right,” or “yeah.”

For instance, at the end of his story about JA, Nigel says: “So yeah, that I think is sort of the most memorable teaching moment, and it’s not like a ‘this’ [points finger down at table], like ‘right then and there,’ but it’s a whole collection of things” (even after he had narrated several “right then and there” moments). Nigel has not (yet) explicitly returned to this “whole collection of things” about his experience with J.A. in his stories; meanwhile, Penny, Simone, and Violet have often revisited stories from previous schooling or workplace experiences again and again, sometimes amending (as in Penny’s case of the fascist teacher-Donald Trump connection in Chapter Three), often laughing, and sometimes adding another memory to the fray without neatly pointing to a pat ending. One of the strengths of this storied approach is that it gets teachers talking outside of the classroom or high pressure situations (job interviews, observations) without telling them exactly what to do, which is the expert urge for teachers who want to offer helpful advice and is also a danger of any teacher or student research that then scripts others without supporting them in building their own complex relationships with knowledge- making in writing studies. Stories open up questions about roles or positions for teachers,

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rather than close them down or flatten them into a simplified list; they allow people to talk themselves into, through, and around experiences of their own making and narrating, as Nigel does here:

I do recognize that, when I give examples, I’m like becoming uh like— So

you said, “Where is an example of—what would be your ‘for instance’?”

So I sort of role played it. I’ve noticed that too, which is weird. Because I

think it’s easier to just be a teacher than to talk about being a teacher, if

that makes any sense. So yeah that’s like—that’s just a thought I had…

[that] doing being teaching, rather than talking about teaching, is yes so

much easier to do… Very different [laughs]

This kind of narrativized role playing is, as Nigel notes, a different kind of informal institutional ephemera that is not quite lore because it doesn’t have to be immediately practical or tell anyone what to do (or not). And such stories are also not “basement office talk” either, which tends to fall into the realm of discourse genres such as teaching advice or complaints about workload and student-teacher frustrations or misunderstandings.

Another possible future for new writing teacher identity learning is to continue to theorize teachers’ experiences via interdisciplinary theories of learning and identity, drawing on research from psychology, education, and sociology, to ask where and how our work might intersect productively with theirs—and why it should. This interdisciplinary call is not new, as Bronwyn T. Williams makes clear in “Seeking New

Worlds: The Study of Writing beyond Our Classrooms,” in which he maintains that

“there just aren’t scholarly conversations happening on a broad scale between our field

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and other fields that are studying literacy practices and pedagogy” (129). Williams argues that “We need to respond more systematically to a world in which the theory and practice of writing and reading increasingly challenge us to recognize the connections between what happens on campus and what happens in other places and at other stages of life”

(130). Though my argument here is not ruled by the same spatial metaphor, Williams’ temporal suggestion undergirds the aims of my longitudinal project, and the same logic applies to new teacher research as to literacy practices and pedagogy, particularly when invoking the term “identity”: identities, like literacies (and learning), exceed the time- spaces of the authorized institutional practices that occupy so much space in new teacher research. In “Considering What It Means to Teach ‘Composition’ in the Twenty-First

Century,” Elizabeth Wardle writes, “teaching writing is no easy task. There is a lot to know about both writing and teaching, and our ability to effectively help our students learn depends a great deal on our understanding of language and language users” (670-

71). With this project, I have also argued and demonstrated that teaching writing also depends a great deal on our understanding of learning and learners. As Wardle maintains, responding to the complexities of teaching writing requires “a great deal of collective effort and a determination to act out of what we know instead of accepting what we have inherited” (671). We already know teaching and writing are far more complex activities than we can easily capture or account for; I would argue that studying complex identities as learned (and told) requires a similar determination. Rather than continuing to reproduce inherited paradigms and problems in new teacher research and preparation, we need to learn to restory disciplinary narratives of new teacher learning and identities in ways that are in sync with contemporary research on how we learn, how we develop

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professional identity, and what learning and teaching should look like and do in contemporary higher education.

Finally, the above steps—thinking and researching narratively, and theorizing learning and identity—can both benefit from feminist stances toward research, learning, and education. Deep engagements and experiences with explicit feminist praxis can palliate some of the already present, lived tensions of newcomers, without placing undue blame on individual teachers who do not need to be portrayed in any binary terms, as victims of our patriarchal educational system or as villains perpetuating the same system no matter how unintentionally. A deeper engagement with, and commitment to, feminist praxis in graduate education and new writing teacher research and preparation is certainly a continuing challenge within patriarchal institutions dedicated to competition and held accountable by governmental systems ruled by capitalist/neoliberal forces. However, feminist praxis is no more or less challenging or rewarding than creating conditions for actual learning, as Ken Bain describes it:

Most fundamentally, teaching in this conception [in which teaching occurs

only when learning takes place] is creating those conditions in which

most—if not all—our students will realize their potential to learn. That

sounds like hard work, and it is a little scary because we don't have

complete control over who we are, but it is highly rewarding and

obtainable. (173, emphasis mine)

Feminist praxis is hard work and, for some, more than a little scary—but rewarding and obtainable. And needed. Because, as Bain claims that good college teachers do, it requires starting with people, not disciplines, even while rooting ourselves firmly in

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disciplinary expertise. It also requires questioning our own educational expertise and social power when we, too, have been perpetrators of patriarchal educational practices, however unwitting and even as we strive to intervene in multiple commonplace narratives that we know are damaging to people over time even as they protect and serve inequitable systems. Let me be clear that feminist praxis is not a magic wand to wave over the mess and “solve” the “problem” (as if problems are singular and monocausal and problem-solving is straightforward, unidirectional, unilinear, and not also, like narrative, combinatorial in and over time). Feminist praxis is instead a way of seeing the mess, working through it with people who need to work through it, and knowing the mess will remain but can also be slowly and incrementally changed for the better.

And so, to come full circle—or perhaps to have continued to ascend on a spiral in progress—this dissertation has sought to illuminate only a few new cracks in our disciplinary stories of new writing teachers by studying five writing teachers learning professional teaching identities for the first time for right now. As these newcomers gain years of additional teaching and life experience, it will not be my job as a researcher to remind them of who they said they wanted to be or to note whether or not they “became” those teachers. Instead, it will be my job to trace their shifting identities and to keep open the interpretations of their identity learning over time. Further, as I continue to elicit storied questions and textual interactions of these five teachers, my job will also be to continue to interrogate our disciplinary representations of newcomers and our methods for arriving at such representations (including my own) as well as how we do (or don’t) use our own disciplinary and institutional knowledge—and our own embodied teaching experiences and memories—to support and encourage newcomer development (cf

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Yancey, “The Professionalization of TA Development Programs”). To ask, for instance, as a field, do we create safe space for being and becoming that not only acknowledges but also authorizes new teachers to be open to experimentation and change? Do we encourage failure and learning, rather than sedimenting mastery and knowing? And if so, how/where/when do we do so? Do we do this in our genres? In our graduate (or for that matter our undergraduate) classrooms? In our professional development? In our research of/on/about newcomers? Furthermore, how do we talk explicitly with new teachers about incorporating their own interests and stances into writing classrooms very different from the graduate classrooms in which they are often learning and experimenting with those stances for the first time? And, as these newcomers’ teaching identities are being learned, motivated, and mediated in complex ways, how will we keep working to move away from flattening research and teaching practices and toward more genuine experimentation and humble learning in relation to the newcomers we are charged to support?

My January 2017 Teaching Story

As Clandinin maintains, all narrative inquirers remain “in the midst…of storied landscapes we are studying” (Clandinin 82). As a researcher, I am still in the midst of trying to understand and make meaning from “the stories under or on the edges of stories lived and told” (Downey and Clandinin, qtd. in Clandinin 82), both my own as well as participants’ stories in this study. So I close this chapter by sharing a recent version of my teaching story that lies “under or on the edge” of the research story I shared in Chapter

Two. It is a story written not for this dissertation but excerpted from a recent campus visit presentation for the university whose faculty I will be joining next year, and I present it

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here, without any additional edits, to share one version of my teaching and research stories in the midst right now.

Since narrative is a powerful intellectual area of inquiry for me, I want to start by giving you one version of my own teaching story.

I have taught high school and college, advanced placement and dual credit, writing and literature. And I have taught at a public traditional high school, two-year college, and four-year metropolitan university. My students have illustrated found poems written by themselves and their classmates; in fact, they have illustrated my classroom walls with quotes and poems before demolition. They have also produced 20-30 page academic research synthesis essays, with multimedia presentations and multimodal components.

When I began my first year of teaching, at the high school I attended several years before, the woman who hired me was my freshman year Algebra I teacher. She asked me if I understood that not all of my students were like me, were the kind of straight A student, teacher’s pet, and people pleaser that I had learned to be. I proclaimed with certainty that I understood this.

I did not understand this at all. But I learned. Quickly—and slowly.

At the end of that first year, I quit. And declared with absolute certainty that I would never teach again.

But I was intrigued by what I perceived to be my own failure. I wanted to like teaching, and I wanted to be better at it in order to find out if I could like it. So while working full time at a local magazine and publishing company, I went to graduate school, choosing rhetoric and composition because I wanted to leverage my love of words and writing, language and communication—and put it to work to figure this teaching thing out.

After I finished, three years later (without having taught again), I returned to the same high school I vowed never set foot in again. That year, I cried less; perhaps I yelled more. My grandmother died, my parents moved, my marriage began to be shakier than I wanted to hold on to. And I didn’t leave teaching again until four wildly successful years later. I had taught 10th, 11th, and 12th grade. I was adjuncting at the two-year college. I had excelled at teaching first year writing, advanced placement literature, and dual credit composition. My students loved learning with me, and I loved being their teacher. I addressed our seniors each year, constructing speeches full of literary allusions and poems they cherished in shared moments of relationship building that meant as much to me as they did to them. And, in a very neat narrative trajectory, my dual credit high school seniors are “seniors” once more, preparing to graduate and walk the stage in May—as I am.

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I am very much the person I was then. But as a writing teacher, I’ve learned to tell some different stories about what matters in writing and higher education.

Now, as one of my dissertation participants James says, “I thought I knew best about a couple things, and I no longer think I know best about anything.” As a feminist and a narrative researcher, I don’t believe there is a “best.” There is different, and there are many.

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Stories can—and do—change. And stories also can—and do—change what (and how) we think, speak, write, and relate to others. I know that the stories I have told about who I am have changed—and have changed me…

If the “task [of narrative inquirers] is not so much to say that people, places, and things are this way or that way but that they have a narrative history and are moving forward,” then this January 17 teaching story shows a glimmer of my own narrative history and how I hope it is moving forward. Further, if “the narrative research text is fundamentally a temporal text—about what has been, what is now, and what is becoming” (Clandinin and Connelly 145-46)—then this final page-based version of this dissertation is a temporal and telling text about my own stories as well as those of participants and of our field. Each step of this project has participated in the process of who I am becoming and being (rather than Clandinin’s “becoming rather than being”) as a researcher, teacher, mentor, scholar, and person, in ways that I cannot trace completely, many of which have yet to unfold. Similarly, this project has participated in the process of who these five new writing teachers are becoming and being (rather than Clandinin’s

“becoming rather than being”) as teachers, thinkers, friends, peers, family members, scholars, writers, and people, in ways that I also cannot trace completely and that are still unfolding. Ultimately, I hope that I will continue to support these five newcomers in connecting with stories that sustain them. Just as I hope that the stories that are currently sustaining me are both visible and invisible threads woven throughout the preceding chapters. Just as participants are learning how to be and become writing teachers and so many things that are meaningful to them, so too am I continually learning how to be a teacher, researcher, scholar, mentor, administrator, and so much more. Just as all of our

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identities are open and shifting, so too is my project open to multiple, inevitably conflicting interpretations without any intention of coming to a singular or set of conclusions ruled by notions of certainty, causality, mastery, knowing, or expertise. And my project is not done, even while much good work has been done thus far. Of all the things I believe about education—in all its hubris and humility—I believe that research, writing, storytelling, and relationship-building in sites of teaching and learning can helps us learn to tell even better stories about who we are and who we can become. And of course, we are all still in the midst—the stories, research, participants, identities, moments represented here are no exception.

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Learning and Teaching. London: Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group, 2008. Print.

Welch, Nancy. “Resisting the Faith: Conversion, Resistance, and the Training of

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Wenger, Etienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print.

Wertsch, James V. Voices of the Mind: A Sociocultural Approach to Mediated Action.

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Wetherell, Margaret. Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding. Los

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Yancey, Kathleen Blake. “The Professionalization of TA Development Programs: A

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APPENDICES

Appendix A

Study Design & Methods

Approved by Human Subjects Protection Program Office (#15.0540)

To conduct a narrative inquiry, this study will use observation and artifact-based interviews to conduct case studies of individual GTAs within the Composition Program at the University of Louisville, and will rely on my own emic perspective as a graduate student, GTA, and new teacher mentor. This narrative inquiry uses multiple methodologies and methods of research and analysis to illuminate how cultural narratives mediate professional identity construction for individual new writing teachers and to draw and tease out multiple, often conflicting narratives of teachers’ perceptions and practices.

The research methods for data collection for this study include interviews, surveys, and observation, primarily of composition instructors who are graduate students in the Department of English at the University of Louisville in graduate-level pedagogy courses, mentoring groups, and sites of professional development and disciplinary learning from June 2015 (pending IRB approval) and through May 2016 for the current dissertation study. Data collected and generated will include video interviews and transcripts, online surveys and reports, field notes made during observations, documents circulated in sites being observed, and both existing and elicited teacher artifacts—all submitted voluntarily and used with permission—including but not limited to new writing teachers’ syllabi, student writing assignments, teaching philosophies, writing

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done and notes taken in the practicum course ENGL602, email or other written communication with participants, other institutional ephemera (e.g., planning notes, peer conversations about teaching) and other narratives in writing (including both digital and print, both alphabetic text and multimodal compositions). These data will be analyzed using narrative, linguistic, and/or discourse analysis of assembled talk and texts and situated in relation to narrative analysis of disciplinary histories of new writing teachers in English studies, and to cultural narratives of schooling, writing, and technology in U.S. educational systems and culture.

This study will occur at the University of Louisville in three programmatic sites of teacher learning: (1) the practicum course, ENGL 602, in the Fall 2015 semester, during new GTA’s first semester of teaching in the Composition Program; (2) the Digital

Composition Colloquium (DCC), in August 2015, and subsequent professional development specifically targeted at digital media and composition pedagogy; and (3) the

University of Louisville Digital Media Academy (DMA), in June 2014 and June 2015

(IRB#14.0161), as an alternative model of responsive graduate education that includes but is not limited to teaching.

Study participants will be GTAs in the Department of English, often teaching within the Composition Program, at the University of Louisville—all of whom may provide documents, information, and responses for research on a voluntary basis. Based on observations and interactions with approximately 35 to 40 teachers in these sites, I will select four to six GTAs (no more than two from each site) for more in-depth case studies. All participation will be voluntary, and participants will retain the right of refusal

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to the use of any recorded, edited, or shared material from observations, surveys, interviews, and any other communication or interaction.

This study takes as its object the learning, perceptions, and stories of new teachers as they are revealed in and through conversations—oral and/or written—about personal and professional histories. Thus, this study uses ethnographically-informed methods of narrative inquiry to capture and contextualize the learning, perceptions, and stories of new teachers in an institutional place of learning and of work. In order to investigate

GTAs’ learning, perceptions, and stories, this study relies on my own emic perspective to understand the contexts surrounding teaching and learning in an individual program. My position in this study will include, rely on, and be saturated by my own experiences as a graduate student, teacher, and researcher at the University of Louisville who occupies (or has occupied before the study, or will occupy during the study) the following positions as part of the Department of English: graduate student peer and mentor, GTA of first-year composition courses, Assistant Director of Composition, digital media workshop facilitator and participant, Digital Composition Colloquium designer and facilitator, and

Digital Media Academy designer, teacher, and researcher.

My position is complex, rich, and complicated in its own ways as well as in its relationship to participants and to the selected sites; and I am aware that my position influences my study and complicates the issue of participant consent without feelings of coercion, however implicit and unintended. While verbally acknowledging my (varying levels of) potential personal relationships with participants, I will also directly address the following with them before presenting them with consent documents to sign: GTAs do not need to participate in this study in order to participate in graduate education, teaching,

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or any other educational and/or workplace events; participation or non-participation will not have any bearing on their work as GTAs in the Department of English; I will not be evaluating participants’ teaching for programmatic, departmental, or institutional purposes; and my interactions with GTAs and observations of them are intended to support them in their learning, teaching, and professionalization.

When introducing this study to participants, I will also emphasize that its purpose is to reveal, describe, and better understand the learning, perceptions, and stories of individual GTAs, rather than an attempt to impose an external pedagogical standard or evaluate individual practices in relation to such a standard. I will also make every effort to ensure GTAs that I understand their actual practices are limited by the constraints of time and available resources; that part of the outcome of the study is to contribute to better GTA support in the Department of English; that participants’ honest responses will be confidential and contribute to this outcome; and that participants may elect to have parts of their responses about their own lives and teaching not used as part of the study.

Further, I will assure potential participants that their participation, declination of participation, or need to opt out once the study has begun, will not adversely affect my study or their professional relationships with the program, its director, faculty, or staff, or me as an administrative representative, mentor, or professional development facilitator.

Observations

From June 2015 through April 2016, I will observe GTAs in three sites with varying levels of participation as a researcher, facilitator, and mentor. The purpose of observation in this study is to see the preparation, learning, and practices of teacher-

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participants in order to create a contextualized understanding of how GTAs are positioned in these three sites and how they respond to and interact with other instructors, faculty, and those in student roles. For this study, I may attempt to survey each of the teacher-participants in these observation sites, but I will not interview or collect individual identifiable responses from all teachers in these sites. During observations, I will record information in my field notes, which will serve to inform my selection of interview participants. In writing for the dissertation, publication, or presentations, I will pare down specific identifying markers and/or develop composites of several participants in order to protect the identity of individuals who give permission to be observed in interaction but who do not give permission to be identified by name and/or whose individual narratives might cause their identities to be easily identifiable (even with the use of pseudonyms) based on distinguishing characteristics.

I will observe The University of Louisville Digital Media Academy (DMA), a two-week digital media summer camp for rising sixth grade girls from local Louisville public schools, in June 2015, with follow-up meetings in July 2015 and possibly throughout the Fall 2015 semester. Led by five graduate students and mentored by Dr.

Mary P. Sheridan and Dr. Andrea Olinger, DMA will take place at UofL in the Bingham

Humanities building as well as other campus sites. My primary role during DMA is researcher-observer, and I will interact with teacher-participants and girl-campers—by need as determined by DMA leaders—as an act of reciprocity in return for teachers’ time and participation. DMA will be video recorded and photographed for research purposes; photography, video, and audio recordings will only be used for this study with participants’ explicit written permission.

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I will also observe and facilitate the Digital Composition Colloquium (DCC), a two-day digital media intensive workshop for new and returning composition instructors at the University of Louisville, in August 2015, and observe and/or facilitate subsequent professional development during the academic year 2015-2016 offering support for digital media and composition pedagogy. Led and facilitated by seven graduate students

(of which I am one) and Dr. Brenda J. Brueggemann from the English department, DCC will take place at UofL in the Bingham Humanities building. My primary role during

DCC is as facilitator, and I will interact with teacher-participants and other instructors in my role as workshop facilitator—as needed and desired by DCC participants—in order to support their comfort, confidence, and facility with incorporating digital media into their writing classrooms. DCC may be video recorded or photographed for research as well as programmatic purposes; photography, video, and audio recordings will only be used with participants’ explicit written permission.

I will also observe and participate in ENGL602, the practicum course for new

GTAs in English during their first semester of teaching in Fall 2015. ENGL602 is taught by Composition Director Brenda J. Brueggemann in the Department of English, and three

Assistant Directors of Composition (of which I am one) mentor new teachers and facilitate weekly mentoring groups of five to six students. ENGL602 will be held at UofL in the Bingham Humanities building. The practicum includes new teacher orientation in

August 2015. My primary role during ENGL602 is as mentor, and I will interact with new teachers in my role as peer mentor, teaching mentor, and Composition Program representative—including during weekly mentoring meetings—in order to support their

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comfort and confidence with, and knowledge and practice of, teaching in the UofL

Composition Program’s first-year writing courses.

In each of these sites, though my primary role varies and my secondary role is as observer, I will also take field notes and collect artifacts that may be relevant to this study, including individual, programmatic, departmental, and/or institutional documents, forms, presentations, sites, communication, and any texts (digital or print) used and circulated during DMA, DCC, or ENGL602.

Surveys

Between August 2015 and April 2016, I will also survey teachers from two specific sites: ENGL602 and the DCC. Each survey will be created online and circulated via email, and each survey will give respondents the option to remain anonymous or to reveal their names. For ENGL602, I will email a link to a survey for new GTA instructors in English (approximately 15). I will also email a link to a similar survey to GTAs in the graduate program in English who have recently experienced the ENGL602 course with

Dr. Brueggemann as instructor (approximately 30) in order to contextualize the current

Fall 2015 group experience. For the DCC, I will email a link to a survey for all participants (approximately 30). Individual responses from surveys will remain confidential and will not be reported to any institutional personnel in supervisory positions in relation to instructors without explicit written permission.

Interviews

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Between November 2015 and April 2016, I will interview GTAs from across the three sites described in this study. Initial information from observations and surveys will inform the selection of voluntary participants for in-depth interview-based case studies.

The purpose of interviews in this study is to obtain a more in-depth, granular understanding of GTAs’ personal and professional stories of schooling (i.e., teaching and learning), writing, and technology.

For this study, I will conduct and video record three rounds of artifact-based interviews of four to six GTAs in English over the course of six months during the 2015-

2016 academic year. Interviews will be conducted strictly on a voluntary basis, will take place at UofL where instructors are employed, and will be limited to no more than one hour each. Interviews may be artifact-based and include discussion of teacher-generated artifacts including but not limited to writing course syllabi, student writing assignments, teaching philosophies, writing done and notes taken in ENGL602, email or other written communication with participants, other institutional ephemera (e.g., planning notes, peer conversations about teaching) and other elicited learning narratives in writing (including both digital and print, both alphabetic text and multimodal compositions).

Before teacher-participants agree to the study or sign consent forms, I will explicitly address that all study participation is voluntary, that participants may choose to leave the study at any time, and that participation or non-participation will not affect their personal or professional relationships with me or any other member of the Composition

Program administrative team or any English department faculty, staff, or graduate student. I will also explicitly address that teacher-participants will have the right of refusal to the use of any recorded or edited material from interviews, before each

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interview and in follow-up communication. When explaining the purposes of this study, I will foreground the risks associated with discussing professional behaviors, even those that accompany everyday practices in composition instruction and graduate education. I will further foreground the measures this study takes to ensure confidentiality and pseudonymity as well as participants’ right to decline to answer questions that make them uncomfortable and to review and edit data collected from interviews and used in write- ups drawing from this study.

Participants selected for interviews will be informed that their individual responses will become data that will be shared with the members of my dissertation committee, which includes the Director of Composition Dr. Brenda J. Brueggemann and

DMA mentor Dr. Mary P. Sheridan. I will not, without explicit written permission, share individual responses with identifying information with Drs. Sheridan or Brueggeman or any supervisory agent in a position of power over their current or future instructional evaluations or assignments. Although one emphasis of the Composition Program and the

Department of English is on incorporating digital, multimodal composition—whether in research, teaching, or other means of professionalization—the purpose of this study is to investigate how people’s personal and professional stories influence their teaching preparation and practices. This includes present practices within the program, including challenges or moments of trouble for new teachers who have a wide range of experiences, expectations, and perceptions. Thus, neither I nor members of my committee expect individual stories or interview answers to align with programmatic, departmental, or institutional aims in part or in their entirety.

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Interviews will be video recorded, with explicit written permission. Video footage will be used for analysis (of the additional contexts of non-linguistic behaviors in addition to linguistic behaviors for discourse or conversation analysis); video and/or audio footage of instructors will be used for presentation or publication only with participants’ explicit written permission. If participants do not give permission for the use of their visual likeness, then only audio from these files will be used by extracting audio from the video files. Audio files can then be used with no identifying markers; or, if participants think their voices identifiable, audio files can be manipulated to be unrecognizable. Instructors may decline the use of video and audio from all or parts of their interviews at any time, and all efforts will be made to seek written permission of individual video and/or audio excerpts in the contexts of the completed multimedia text, both for current and future use of this material for research purposes.

Pseudonymity may be preserved through both the use of pseudonyms and the paring down of specific identifying markers in any presentation or publication.

Identification in interviews may be difficult to trace due to the relatively large number of

GTAs in the English department at UofL each year. Participants will also be given a chance to read the data collected from them (in transcripts) and opt out if their material becomes too identifying in ways they had not noticed or anticipated during data collection. These attempts to protect individuals’ identities and comfort in participation will be made so that GTAs will not feel subject to the loss of job security or comfort in their working environment, including possible reprisal through future course assignments or institutional evaluation.

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Data collected from and during these interviews will include the video-recorded interviews themselves as well as other artifacts for analysis, whether they are voluntarily provided and discussed during the interview or voluntarily provided after the interview in communication with teacher-participants. Artifacts may include writing course syllabi, student writing assignments, teaching philosophies, writing done and notes taken in

ENGL602, email or other written communication with participants, other institutional ephemera (e.g., planning notes, peer conversations about teaching) and other elicited narratives in writing (including both digital and print, both alphabetic text and multimodal compositions).

Taken together, data from this study will be available for analysis for my dissertation project and subsequent research for presentation and publication. Because my dissertation project is ultimately interested in encouraging and supporting empowering dispositions for new writing teachers rather than abject subject positions—and articulating architectures of participation that might facilitate these—analysis may include linguistic analysis in the service of narrative analysis (Riessman) and inquiry

(Addison, “Narrative as Method and Methodology”) and a discourse analysis (see

Fairclough, for example) of assembled talk and texts (see Geisler, for example). This data will be situated in relation to my dissertation’s historical analysis of disciplinary narratives of new writing teachers in English studies, and to the cultural narratives of schooling, writing, and technology in U.S. educational systems and culture.

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Appendix B

Interview Questions

Approved by Human Subjects Protection Program Office (#15.0540)

Round 1

The first round of interview questions in November and December 2015 will elicit stories about professional identity, including about teachers, teaching, and participants’ imagined future identities as teachers. Round one will include the following questions:

1. What’s a memorable story or encounter that you’ve had with someone you

consider to be a good teacher?

2. What stories did people tell about teachers in your family and/or friend group?

3. Can you describe a moment or event in ENGL602 that has shaped your thinking

about the kind of teacher you are right now?

4. Can you tell me about something you ended up using in teaching that you didn’t

expect to, like a text or assignment or artifact or story?

5. If you were going to share a story from your own teaching experience with

someone who was going to be teaching writing for the first time, what would you

tell them?

6. Could you describe what your ideal “day in the life of a teacher” would be?

Follow-up questions to elicit further stories will include:

1. Can you describe what kind of student you were in the classroom with this

teacher?

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2. How would you describe that teacher’s “teaching philosophy,” in your own

words, in retrospect?

3. If you had to choose two objects that remind you of being a student, what would

they be? And how do you think about those objects now that you are a teacher?

4. Can you tell me about a memorable story about teachers or teaching that you have

read about, heard about, or seen?

5. Could you describe another moment or event from ENGL602 that stands out as

memorable? Why does that story stand out?

6. Why would you choose that story to share with a new teacher?

7. Could you tell me about a story from your own teaching that you might not want

to share with a new teacher? And why?

8. Is that a story you’ve told before? A lot? Or, is that a story you haven’t told

before?

9. Is there a “bad experience” story that you might tell a new teacher for a particular

reason?

10. When and where do you imagine this “day in the life” might take place? With

whom?

11. Could you describe a course you would like to teach or design?

12. Could you tell me what you imagine your students might take away from the

experience of being in this course with you?

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Round 2

The second round of interview questions in January and February 2016 will elicit stories about digital pedagogies, including digital technologies, digital media in composition pedagogy, and participants’ responses to a specific digital pedagogy assignment given by the Composition Program. Round two will include the following questions:

1. What’s a memorable experience you’ve had with someone involving a certain

piece of technology, or a specific digital tool or platform?

2. What stories do people tell about digital media in your family and/or friend

group?

3. Have you had memorable experiences involving digital media in school? How

would you describe that experience and teacher?

4. Can you describe a moment, event, or part of ENGL602 or the DCC that has

shaped the way you use and think about using digital media in the writing

classroom?

5. If you were going to share a story about teaching writing with digital media, or

the specific Concept in 60 assignment, with someone who was going to be

teaching writing for the first time, what would you tell them?

6. How might you use digital media as part of your ideal “day in the life” of a

teacher in the future?

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Follow-up questions to elicit further stories will include:

1. Can you tell me about a memorable story about digital media that you have read

about, heard about, or seen? What about a memorable story about digital media in

schools?

2. Why would you choose that story to share with a new teacher?

3. Could you tell me about a story from your own teaching writing with digital

media that you might not want to share with a new teacher? And why?

4. Is there a “bad experience teaching with digital media” story that you might tell a

new teacher for a particular reason?

5. Could you tell me a little bit about how you responded/might respond to the

Concept in 60 assignment when/if you were asked to use it in a first-year writing

classroom?

6. What parts of the Concept in 60 assignment do you think fit with who you are as a

teacher and your goals for your class?

7. What parts of this specific Concept in 60 assignment would you change before

sharing it with your students? Why?

8. Could you tell me about a moment or event regarding digital media during

ENGL602 or the DCC that stands out as memorable? Why does that story stand

out?

Round 3

The third round of interview questions in March and April 2016 will prompt conversation about participants’ responses to an existing document they have written that discusses or

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represents a part of their teaching identity right now; participants will select this document and share it with me before this final interview. Round three will include the following questions:

1. How would you describe the background or context of this piece of writing?

2. Is there a moment in, or part of, this narrative that captures how you see yourself

as a teacher right now? And why?

3. If you were going to change anything in this piece of writing, what would that be?

Why?

4. Is there a moment in, or part of, this narrative that captures who you would like to

be as a teacher in the future?

5. If you were to take one moment or statement from this document, and use it as

part of your next teaching philosophy, what would that be? Why? What kind of

story would you build up around that moment?

Follow-up questions to elicit further interaction will include:

1. Is this a document that you might use again? Why?

2. Is there something here that doesn’t quite represent how you see yourself as a

teacher right now?

3. Why would you change that part of the document rather than another?

4. In our interviews, have there been any other stories that you think might better

capture how you want to represent yourself (in a revision of this document)?

5. Have there been any stories that you remember telling in our interviews that you would like to complicate, add to, or amend?

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Appendix C

Full size images of teacher texts from Chapter Five

—Violet’s Annotated Bibliography Assignment

—Violet’s Group Website Assignment

—James’ Notes on Habits of Mind from “Framework for Success in Postsecondary

Writing”

—James’ Notes on James Gee’s Discourse

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CURRICULUM VITAE

1449 S. 1st St. #2 Louisville, KY 40208 407.461.4252 | [email protected] rgramer.wordpress.com

RACHEL GRAMER

EDUCATION

UNIVERSITY OF LOUISVILLE 2017 PhD, Rhetoric and Composition Dissertation: “Stories at Work: Restorying Narratives of New Teachers’ Identity Learning in Writing Studies” Committee: Mary P. Sheridan (chair), Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Bronwyn T. Williams, Tatjana Soldat-Jaffe, Jessica Restaino

UNIVERSITY OF CENTRAL FLORIDA 2008 MA, English/Rhetoric and Composition Thesis: “A Genre of Collective Intelligence: Blogs as Intertextual, Reciprocal, and Pedagogical”

ROLLINS COLLEGE 2001 BA, summa cum laude, English Major (Honors), Writing Minor Thesis: “The Naiveté of Escape and the Art of Transformation: Inner Journeys of Reflective Women Travel Writers”

RESEARCH AND ADMINISTRATIVE EXPERIENCE

NOTHING ABOUT ME WITHOUT ME TEAM LEADER/ University of CO-RESEARCHER Louisville Recorded workshops, conducted interviews, and edited 2016-17 digital projects for Louisville Council on Developmental Disabilities project; recorded and participated in free art workshops for Kentuckians with developmental disabilities; organized and led four-person team of graduate students on digital recording, production, and tutoring in photography and videography

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ASSISTANT DIRECTOR OF COMPOSITION University of Mentored and observed new writing teachers; Louisville scheduled 200 courses and 70 instructors per term; 2015-16 facilitated annual orientation and monthly workshops; revised policies and procedures; conducted program research for department and college; mediated student grievances; supported instructors in incorporating digital tools and assignments; collaborated on program development and events

DIGITAL MEDIA RESEARCH ASSISTANT University of Conducted independent qualitative research projects; Louisville facilitated digital media research and pedagogy 2014-16 workshops; received grant for Digital Media Academy; wrote Kentucky higher educational policy reports for National Council of Teachers of English; conducted research and edited writing for faculty scholarship; synthesized research on state educational policy, digital humanities, and graduate education

DIGITAL COMPOSITION COLLOQUIUM DESIGNER University of Designed and facilitated two-day professional Louisville development colloquium for 35 composition August 18-19, 2015 instructors; created event website and writing course resources; facilitated sessions on digital composition and video editing; collaborated with four graduate students and composition director on curriculum, follow-up programming, and two-day year-end assessment of multimodal digital projects

ART AS MEMORY CO-RESEARCHER University of Recorded and edited material for documentary film Louisville project for Louisville Council on Developmental 2014-15 Disabilities; recorded and participated in free art workshops with adults and children with developmental disabilities

DIGITAL MEDIA ACADEMY CO- University of RESEARCHER/TEACHER Louisville Designed free digital media summer camp curriculum 2014-15 for 20 middle school girls; taught girls digital image manipulation, video editing, and collaborative digital text creation and presentation; conducted collaborative research project for presentation and publication

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ENGLISH DEPARTMENT CHAIR St. Cloud High Led department meetings; coordinated professional School 2010-13 development training; acted as liaison between high school and county administration and English department teachers regarding curriculum, communication, scheduling, and materials

TEACHING EXPERIENCE

GRADUATE TEACHING ASSISTANT University of Introduction to College Writing Louisville 2014-16 Intermediate College Writing American Literature II Digital Media Academy (summer camp)

TUTOR University of University Writing Center Louisville 2015

ADJUNCT INSTRUCTOR Valencia College Composition I 2012-13 Composition II

ENGLISH LANGUAGE ARTS TEACHER St. Cloud High Dual Enrollment Composition I School Dual Enrollment Composition II 2003-04, 2009-13 Advanced Placement Literature and Composition English III Honors, English III English II

PUBLICATIONS

Peer-Reviewed

“Review Essay: No Day at the Beach: Women ‘Making It’ in Academia.” With Brenda Jo Brueggemann. College English 79.3 (2017): 297-316. Print.

“How Might We Make Mobility Work for Writing Studies?” With Mary P. Sheridan. (Response) Working Paper Series on Mobility Work in Composition: Translation, Migration, Transformation. Louisville: Thomas R. Watson Conference on Rhetoric and Composition, October 2016. Web.

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“Mess, Not Mastery: Encouraging Digital Design Dispositions in Girls.” With Elizabeth Chamberlain and Megan Faver Hartline. Computers and Composition Online (Fall-Spring 2015). Web.

“ClarissaBlogs: Narrative, Writing, and the Self.” With Debra Journet, Anthony O'Keeffe, Stephen Cohen, Megan Hartline, Keri Mathis, Kendra Sheehan, and Jessica Winck. Kairos 19.2 (Spring 2015). Web.

“Response: Responsivity as a Stance.” JAC 34.1-2 (2014): 199-208. Print.

Forthcoming

“The Figured Worlds of Digital Mediation in Schools.” Writing for Engagement: Responsive Practice for Social Action. Accepted by editors; under advanced contract with Lexington Press.

In Progress

“Interrogating What We’ve Inherited: Narratives of Resistance in New Teacher Preparation,” for submission to College Composition and Communication.

Reports

“Charter Schools Not Just for K12 Advocacy,” with Amy Nichols and Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 18 Feb. 2017. Web.

“Lingering Questions: The Delay of Free Two-Year College Tuition in KY,” with Laura Matravers and Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 16 June 2016. Web.

“Supporting Diverse Students on Campus, Post-College Readiness,” with Khirsten L. Echols and Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 22 Mar. 2016. Web.

“Higher Education Support for Latin@ Students in Kentucky,” with Sara P. Alvarez and Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 18 Mar. 2016. Web.

“Higher Ed in KY Faces Budget Cuts, Outcomes-Based Funding,” with Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 22 Feb. 2016. Web.

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“Kentucky Two-Year College Funding,” with Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 8 Nov. 2015. Web.

“Kentucky Appoints Stephen Pruitt as New Education Commissioner,” with Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 14 Oct. 2015. Web.

“Gap in Higher Ed Funding Legislation in Kentucky,” with Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 6 May 2015. Web.

“Kentucky’s CPE/Commonwealth College Collaboration,” with Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 10 Feb. 2015. Web.

“The State of Funding in Kentucky,” with Mary P. Sheridan. Policy Analysis Initiative. National Council of Teachers of English, 10 Feb. 2015. Web.

Poetry

“Bilingual.” Our Time Is Now 1.2 (June 2003). Print.

“Across the Sabula Bridge” and “No Such Thing as Atlanta.” Brushing, Rollins College Literary Magazine (2000). Print.

AWARDS AND GRANTS

University Fellowship University of School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies Louisville 2013-14, 2016-17

Graduate Teaching Assistantship University of Department of English Louisville 2014-16

Outstanding PhD Student Award ($100) University of English Graduate Organization Louisville 2016

Supporting Undergraduate Innovation: Ideas to Action (i2a) University of Implementation Grant ($3800) Louisville “Squaring Composition at the University of Louisville,” with 2015 Dr. Brenda Brueggemann, Elizabeth Chamberlain, and Megan Faver Hartline Ideas to Action Team/Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning

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CCCC Research Initiative Grant ($8325) Conference on College “Digital Media Academy: Designing Responsive Structures of Composition and Graduate Student Professionalization,” with Mary P. Sheridan Communication and Megan Faver Hartline 2014-15

Carolyn Krause Maddox Prize ($300) University of “Mess, Not Mastery: Encouraging Digital Design Dispositions Louisville in Girls,” with Elizabeth Chamberlain and Megan Faver 2015 Hartline Women’s and Gender Studies Department

Gesa E. Kirsch Travel Award ($270) University of Department of English Louisville 2015

Dr. M. Celeste Nichols Professional Development Award University of ($500) Louisville Women’s Center 2014

Graduate Student Council travel grant ($350) University of School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies Louisville 2014, 2015, 2016

Graduate Student Union Research travel grant ($100) University of College of Arts and Sciences Louisville 2014

Distinguished Teacher American Board for Certification of Teaching Excellence, 2010

Master’s Comprehensive Exam University of Central Pass with Distinction Florida October 2007

Outstanding Senior Scholar in the Humanities Rollins College April 2001

Howard Fox Senior Thesis Award Rollins College April 2001

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Presidential Scholar Rollins College 1997-2001

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

“Bounding and Aligning: The Warp and Weft of Writing Portland, OR Research Dissertation Methods” March 2017 Conference on College Composition and Communication

“Stories at Work: Restorying Narratives of New Teachers’ Portland, OR Identity Learning in Writing Studies” March 2017 Qualitative Research Network, Conference on College Composition and Communication

“The Origins (and Travels) of New Writing Teacher Identities” Louisville, KY Thomas R. Watson Conference October 2016

“Newcomers, Feminist Mentoring, and Digital Composition: Raleigh, NC An Argument for Andragogy in WPA Work” July 2016 Council of Writing Program Administrators Conference

“Projecting the Past into Future Practice: New Writing Houston, TX Teachers’ Narrative Trajectories” April 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication

“Telling Stories, Telling Selves: What New Writing Teachers’ Houston, TX Stories Tell Us (and How)” April 2016 Qualitative Research Network, Conference on College Composition and Communication

“Rescripting Teaching and Technology: Women Educating Tempe, AZ Teachers in Digital Composition” October 2015 Feminisms and Rhetorics Conference

“Designing a New Camp Curriculum of Digital Collaboration: Tampa, FL What the Teachers Learned” March 2015 Conference on College Composition and Communication

“Talking about Dispositions: Teacher Narratives and Tampa, FL Professional Identity” March 2015 Qualitative Research Network, Conference on College Composition and Communication

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“Listening before/as Beginning: A Responsive Stance toward Louisville, KY Educational Partnerships in Teaching with Digital Tools” October 2014 Thomas R. Watson Conference

“Investing in Identity: Narrative Agency in the Nomadic Chicago, IL Chick’s Travel Blog” April 2014 Pop Culture Association/American Culture Association

“Writing Instruction as Meta-Genre” Indianapolis, IN Research Network Forum, Conference on College March 2014 Composition and Communication

“Narrative Convergence: Dialogue and Lyrics as Voiceover in Louisville, KY the ‘New’ Gatsby” February 2014 Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900

“The Discrimination of Men Organizing Against Pornography” Bath, England Women’s History Network Ninth Annual Conference September 2000

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Work-in-progress presenter University of “The Stories We Learn to Tell: New Teachers’ Narratives of Louisville Identity” October 2016 UofL Discourse and Semiotics group

Workshop facilitator University of “Digital Initiatives in Composition” Louisville Composition Program August 2016

Invited panelist University of “Balancing Roles as Students and GTAs” Louisville School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies August 2016

Designer, leader, and facilitator University of Digital Pedagogies Faculty Learning Community Louisville Composition Program Spring 2016

Workshop presenter University of “Fall Forward Designs: Creating Your Syllabus” Louisville Composition Program April 2016

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Workshop co-presenter University of “Document Design” Louisville Department of English April 2016

Workshop co-presenter University of “Effective Teaching with Technology” Louisville School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies April 2016

Invited panelist University of “Integrating Technology into Your Classroom” Louisville Graduate Teaching Assistant Academy, School of March 2016, Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies March 2017

Workshop co-presenter University of “Embracing the Short Form: Visual Arguments for Research Louisville and Teaching” February 2016 Department of English

Workshop co-presenter University of “Composing Communities: Getting Involved in the Student Louisville Celebration of Writing” January 2016 Composition Program

Panel discussion facilitator University of “Connecting Students with Communities” Louisville Composition Program October 2015

Participant University of Graduate Teaching Assistant Academy Louisville School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies 2015-16

Workshop co-presenter University of “Library Research at UofL” Louisville Composition Program August 2015

Designer and co-facilitator University of “Digital Composition Colloquium” Louisville Composition Program August 18-19, 2015

Classroom workshop leader University of “Incorporating Research in Academic Writing” Louisville University Writing Center July 2015

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Participant Ohio State Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) Institute University Department of English May 11-22, 2015

Participant University of Grant Writing Academy Louisville School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies Spring 2015

Workshop co-presenter University of “Networking” Louisville English Graduate Organization March 2015, October 2016

Workshop co-presenter University of “Let’s Get Creative: Video Editing for Professional Purposes” Louisville School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies February 2015

Workshop co-presenter University of “Be Searchable: Online Portfolios for the Job Search” Louisville School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies January 2015, January 2016

Workshop facilitator University of “Digital Composing and Student Research” Louisville Department of English November 2014

Workshop presenter University of “Creating Digital Assignments” Louisville Department of English October 2014

Facilitator University of “iMovie Play” Louisville October Department of English 2014

Workshop co-presenter University of “Dialogue Gone Digital: Tools for Student and Teacher Louisville Interaction” September 2014 Department of English

Workshop presenter University of “Digital Media Meets English: Our Resources” Louisville Composition Program August 2014

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Workshop facilitator University of “Digital Media and Composition Pedagogy with Peers” Louisville Composition Program August 2014

PROFESSIONAL SERVICE

University

Teaching Innovation Learning Lab Steering Committee University of Delphi Center for Teaching and Learning Louisville 2015-17

Student Ambassador University of School of Interdisciplinary and Graduate Studies Louisville 2014-2016

Department

Graduate student representative University of Graduate Committee Louisville Department of English 2016-17

Faculty liaison University of English Graduate Organization Louisville Department of English 2016-17

Photographer and videographer University of Thomas R. Watson Conference Louisville October 2014

PhD student peer mentor University of Department of English Louisville 2014-16

New teacher mentor St. Cloud High English Department School 2011-13

Faculty representative St. Cloud High Guidance Advisory Council School 2012-13

Essay coach for Rising Stars graduating seniors Osceola County School District 2009-10

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Community

Interviewer, photographer, videographer, tutor Louisville, KY Nothing About Me Without Me project 2016-17 Louisville Council on Developmental Disabilities

Photographer, videographer, interviewer Louisville, KY Digital Media Academy June 2015, June 2016

Photographer, videographer, video editor Louisville, KY Art as Memory project 2014-2015 Louisville Council on Developmental Disabilities

Essay coach for college-bound seniors Louisville, KY English Department, Doss High School 2013

Discipline

Peer reviewer 2015-present Kairos Praxis Wiki

Peer reviewer 2014 Action Research journal

OTHER PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

VS PUBLISHING CO./CENTRAL FLORIDA LIFESTYLE Orlando, FL MAGAZINE 2004-2009 Coordinated copywriting, advertising, photography, copyediting, design, and layout for monthly magazine; updated magazine website; wrote copy and articles for local and tourism publications; organized and managed content for nine publications

THE MARJORIE KINNAN RAWLINGS JOURNAL OF Winter Park, FL FLORIDA LITERATURE 2001 Copyedited scholarly journal articles

THE SANDSPUR, ROLLINS COLLEGE NEWSPAPER Rollins College Supervised weekly college newspaper editorial 1998-2001 calendar, design, layout, and copyediting; supervised and

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supported staff writers; wrote editorials and articles; copyedited weekly newspaper

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Rollins College 1998-2001 Assisted writing program assessment; wrote department newsletter; copyedited faculty projects; coordinated with writers, faculty, and staff for annual visiting authors series

GRADUATE COURSEWORK

PEDAGOGY Teaching College Composition (UofL) Writing, Language, Cognition, and Culture in Curriculum Design (UofL) Theory and Practice in Composition (UCF) Teaching Creative Writing (UCF) Teaching Expository Writing (Emerson College)

RHETORIC AND WRITING STUDIES Research in Composition (UofL) Composing Identities: Exploring Literacy, Culture, and Agency (UofL) Conversation Analysis (UofL) Emerging Genres (UofL) Community Literacy (UofL) Theories of Interpretation from New Criticism to the Present (UofL) Studies in Literacy and Writing (UCF) Rhetorical Traditions (UCF) Rhetorical Movements: Classical Rhetoric (UCF) Modern Rhetorical Theory (UCF) Methods in Research and Bibliography (UCF)

LITERATURE Clarissa and Blogs (UofL) The Cultural History of American Authorship (UofL) Counter-Modernities and the Postcolonial Novel (UofL) Literary Theory and Criticism (Emerson College) Contemporary World Fiction: African and Caribbean Literature (Emerson College)

CREATIVE WRITING Poetry Workshop, with Bill Knott (Emerson College) Poetry Workshop, with David Barber (Emerson College)

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PROFESSIONAL MEMBERSHIPS

Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition Conference on College Composition and Communication Council of Writing Program Administrators National Council of Teachers of English

REFERENCES

Dr. Mary P. Sheridan 502.333.8795 Professor of English [email protected] University of Louisville

Dr. Brenda Jo Brueggemann 860.486.2007 Professor and Aetna Chair of Writing [email protected] University of Connecticut

Dr. Bronwyn T. Williams 502.852.2173 Professor of English, Director of University [email protected] Writing Center University of Louisville

Dr. Jessica Restaino 973.655.7312 Associate Professor of English [email protected] Montclair State University

Dr. Beth Boehm 502.852.3975 Dean of the School of Interdisciplinary and [email protected] Graduate Students, Professor of English University of Louisville

Dr. Kathleen Bell 321.868.0463 Associate Professor Emeritus of Writing and [email protected] Rhetoric University of Central Florida

Dr. Blake Scott 407.823.1057 Professor of Writing and Rhetoric [email protected] University of Central Florida

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